This Research Opportunity for Women - Research Planning Grant will allow two female social scientists from Howard University to conduct two months of field research in Jamaica, Guyana and Trinidad to study the ethnobotany of medicinal plants. The researchers will interview midwives, herbalists and supernatural healers and clients as well as government and public health officials and academicians about the local uses of medicinal plants. In additional ethnobotanical samples will be collected, photographed and prepared. The study will assess the differential use of fold medicine by different social classes, identify the illness syndromes associated with medicinal plants, and relate the use and appreciation of folk ethnomedicine to the available biomedical care. %%% This research is important in several ways: it will help us understand a folk medicine system used by many people in the USA as well as in other countries; it will facilitate the research careers of women scientists by helping them start a pilot project that should result in a major research proposal; and it will lay the groundwork for future involvement of minority students in this research project.
