Spending parts of five years in the late 1990s on the island nation of Dominica allowed Marsha Quinlan, an anthropology professor, to get a first-hand look at how folk medicine has evolved in the Caribbean.

“The villagers do believe that witches and werewolves cause some of their ailments,” Quinlan said. “They may blame a sickness on something a witch has done or due to contact with a werewolf. Then they use a home remedy to cure that particular sickness.

“But, the medicine itself is not all hocus-pocus,” she said. “When you cut through all the myths, you find that they effectively practice medicine through the use of herbal remedies.”

Quinlan has documented her findings in the new book “From the Bush – The Front Line of Health Care in a Caribbean Village.” The book is the first case study of medical anthropology exploring the world of folk medicine in the Caribbean.

The book’s theme is that cultural ideas about the body and uses of medicinal plants are deeply intertwined.

“Their way of thinking about why a person gets sick and then using herbal medicines to treat the illness has been handed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years,” Quinlan said. “Yet, it works for them. They’ve been able to create highly effective medicines in order to survive.”

 Quinlan selected the island due to its isolation from the industrialized world.

“It is very quiet there and being white, I was in the minority,” she said. “They get very few visitors from the United States because there is little tourism or industry to attract people.”

Dominica, which is about four times the size of Washington D.C., has about 70,000 residents. The mountainous island is located between the Caribbean Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean, about one-half of the way between Puerto Rico and Trinidad and Tobago.

 “I’ve talked to several people on the island by phone over the years, but I plan to go back to see how the life on the island has changed,” Quinlan said. “The government has installed pipes to bring water to the village, which is known as Bwa Mawego, and more people have phones and radios now.

“But, it is still a long trip on an old bus to the nearest city, which has a hospital and pharmacy. I think the people in Bwa Mawego will be dependent on folk medicine for many years.”

(NOTE TO EDITORS: For more information, contact Quinlan at mquinlan@bsu.edu or (765) 285-1170.)