Nicole Maxwell

The following article is reprinted from the Time/Life series "Healing Mysteries".

Salvaging from the Jungle Sages

     Ethnobotany is a new science whose mission is to rescue an old one - to salvage the herbal medical lore of jungle shamans before encroaching civilization destroys both their preserves and their knowledge.

     Among the earliest ethnobotanists was venturesome Nicole Maxwell, who literally stumbled into the field. The daughter of a privileged San Francisco family, Maxwell dabbled in medicine and several other studies, was married and divorced, and at age forty was still restlessly searching for her true calling when she set out to explore the wilds of South America. One day in 1952, she tripped and fell on her machete in a Peruvian jungle, cutting her arm. A tourniquet failed to staunch the blood flow, so she accepted an Indian remedy - some dark liquid that was both taken orally and applied to the wound. the bleeding, she reported later, stopped in about three minutes.
For the next four decades, Maxwell made many more jungle forays to collect flora used in South American Indian folk medicine. She recorded her adventures in a 1961 book, Witch Doctor's Apprentice.

     What she lacked in academic credentials, Maxwell made up in curiosity, enthusiasm, and faith in her work. Of the hundreds of plants she amassed, she reckoned that at least thirty could provide treatments that currently lie beyond modern medicine. She found, for instance, that a sedge called the piripiri was used by several tribes as a highly effective oral contraceptive. Given to a girl at puberty, the drug apparently prevented conception for six to seven years. There were also plant concoctions that seemed able to promote fertility, stop internal bleeding, prevent tooth decay, allow the extraction of teeth without pain or bleeding, dissolve kidney stones, and cause fast and scarless healing of burns.

     One drug company backed a Maxwell expedition and promised to research her findings. It finally became clear, however, that the company's real interest was in the promotional value of a stylish woman hacking through jungles for native cures. No effort was made to test or exploit her discoveries.

     But attitudes are changing. Since ethnobotany began in the 1930's and 1940's, herbal healing has yielded proven tools, among them digitalis for heart failure, curare as a muscle relaxant, and vincristine for treating leukemia. And more dedicated scientists are entering the field, even as the earth's tropical rain forests are being decimated. Their hope is that the unwritten wisdom of the shamans, passed down orally through long generations, can be saved before the witch doctors vanish along with the jungles.

This is Nicole Maxwell in 1993, retired in West Palm Beach, Florida. She remained on the Amazon Herb Company Advisory Board until her passing in 1998.
 

 
Click here to read an excerpt from Nicole Maxwell's book about
Uña de Gato.

Read more about Nicole Maxwell in her book:

Witch-Doctor's Apprentice, Hunting for Medicinal Plants in the Amazon
by Nicole Maxwell, Citadel Press, 1990 

Nicole's book is filled with stories of her herbal discoveries, and we encourage you to read her book. 
Uña de Gato (Cat's Claw),
is one of the most remarkable and important discoveries.