Health Beyond the Blog: Cassandra Quave’s “The Plant Hunter”

Emory professor Cassandra Quave’s memoir transports readers across the world to learn about traditional medicine.

by Alexa Morales

The Plant Hunter: A Scientist’s Quest for Nature’s Next Medicines by Dr. Cassandra Quave is a captivating memoir that weaves together science, adventure, and personal reflections. Quave, a medical ethnobotanist and researcher at Emory University, shares her journey starting from childhood, which was marked by physical adversity battling orthopedic defects on her right leg and foot. Quave explains that, after getting a staph infection at the age of three, it was modern medicine and antibiotics that saved her life. This inspired her to start looking for ways to blend together insights from multiple disciplines in the sciences, arts, and humanities to learn how ethnobotany could shape medicine in the future. 

The work she describes in her book is centered on the belief that nature, particularly plants used in traditional healing practices around the world, is the key to solving the pressing medical challenges and questions we face today. To answer these questions, Quave travels to diverse regions; from the Amazon rainforest to the Mediterranean hillsides, in the search of medicinal plants and to learn more about the cultural wisdom that surrounds them.

By re-creating events and conversations, Quave conjures vivid scenes that allow the reader to take part in this journey. She further involves her audience, engaging them in critical questions about biodiversity, sustainability, and the often-overlooked value of indigenous knowledge in contemporary medicine.The Plant Hunter is the perfect book for readers interested in public health, pharmacology, or environmental science, or for anyone who enjoys stories about the ways in which nature and human experiences are intertwined.

The Plant Hunter is available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.