Traditional medical lore along with its practitioners â druggists and healers â survives in Yemen today. Owing to the country's rich biodiversity, the main body of the medicines is plant-based. This book features fourteen scholars from Europe, North America and the Middle East (three of them from Yemen) who represent both humanities and natural sciences. They address the topic of herbal medicines and their multifaceted applications within traditional Yemeni society across boundaries of disciplines, such as Islamic studies, history, social anthropology, pharmacy and agriculture. The approaches are based on textual analysis, empirical research and laboratory experiment. Both historical and contemporary issues are covered.
Dr. Ingrid Hehmeyer, an Associate Professor of History of Science and Technology at Ryerson University, Toronto (Canada), received her Doctorate in Agriculture in 1988 and a Master of Science (equiv.) in Pharmacy in 1990, both from the University of Bonn.
Anne Regourd, Ph.D. in Philosophy (1987), teaches at the University of Paris 4-Sorbonne, and is Associee at the CNRS. She published on Divinatory and Magic practices in Mediaeval Islam and contemporary Yemen (Religious Anthropology, History of Sciences) and in Arabic Philology.
Dr. Hanne Schönig, Ph.D. (1984) in Oriental Languages and Islamic Studies, is a researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Area Studies, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. She has published on Yemeni material culture including Schminken, Düfte und Räucherwerk der Jemenitinnen (Ergon, 2002).
ââ¦an important contribution to the study of traditional plant-based medicine, broadly embedded in its fascinating cultural, religious, and historical contexts.â
Jillian M. De Gezelle in Economic Botany XX(X) 2013.
âBringing together almost every scholar who has worked on traditional herbal medicine in Yemen, this book is a summation of decades of research and will be the one comprehensive treatment of the subject for years to come.â
Werner Daum in Bulletin of the British Foundation for the Study of Arabia (BFSA) 18 (2013).
"... die Lektüre dieser interdisziplinären Beiträge ist ein Gewinn."
Dr. Armin Schopen in Jemen-Report 45.1-2 (2014).
Foreword, Sheikh A. Bawazir
Acknowledgements
A note on transliteration convention
List of illustrations and maps
About the authors
Index of plants and fungi
Index of names
Index of topics and keywords
Academic readers from various disciplinary fields, such as philology, history of medicine, Middle Eastern Studies, area studies (Yemen: medieval and contemporary, Jewish Yemen), anthropology, ethnography, agronomy, botany, pharmacy, pharmacology and ecology.