Medicine Trees of the Tropics

Abstract

"Medicinal plants play an important role in the lives of rural people' particularly in remote parts of developing countries with few health facilities. Tropical forests are the source of a large proportion of the world's recognized medicinal plants. It is variously estimated that there are between 200000 and 700000 species of tropical flowering plants. Such a wealth of identified species, which have been in no sense thoroughly investigated, constitutes an enormous potential source of plant-derived chemicals useful to man."