Shaman's Apprentice Chapter Summary

The name of this book is Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice. The author of this book is Mark Plotkin. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on May 21, 1955. He went to Newman High school and graduated in 1973. As a child, he was mesmerized with nature and his free time was spent by going to swamps to collect snakes and other wildlife. Mark Plotkin is an ethnobotanist. The objective of this book is about finding medicinal plants in the Amazon Rainforest to cure common diseases. Sometimes Western medicines cannot cure common diseases. Western medicines like Tylenol and Ibuprofen cannot cure fevers and cold. This book was published in 1993. Mark Plotkin travels to different parts of the Amazon rainforest and collect several medicinal plants for a …show more content…
Mark Plotkin followed the old jaguar shaman into the jungle and they were in the jungle for only three days. He was being called the pananakiri. Pananakiri means the alien. On a cold September evening in 1974, his decision on how to spend the rest of his lives happened during a lecture in the Harvard University. He recalls how Professor Schultes class has inspired him to choose a career in ethnobotany and those teachings has made him learn about the medicinal plants. When he was eighteen years old, he went to University of Pennsylvania and its biology department and soon he found out that he did not have any interest in that field. Quinine was first discovered by South American Indians a thousand years ago. It is derived from the bark of the cinchona tree and it is used to treat …show more content…
In this chapter, Mark Plotkin travels to Suriname to collect medicinal plants. Suriname is located in the northeast portion of South America between Guyana and French Guiana and it is one of the least populated countries in the world. There are several number of Jews living in the country and Hindustanis, Javanese, and Chinese were brought to Suriname as contract workers to work in the sugar plantations. He had an appointment with the director of the Nature Protection Division and he signed a form which is called Application to Conduct Research in Suriname. He had a guide who is named Fritz Von Toon who spoke Sranan Tongo which is the local language of Suriname and he also spoke broken English. The first tree which they came upon was a member of the legume family with thick roots. Fritz said that the name of this tree is called agrobigi which means it grows big. The bark of the tree is brewed into a tea and it is used to treat