Healers and Medicinal Plants of Yemen - In the Land of Frankincense, Aloe, and Coffee

This work is the culmination of 20 years of research on medicinal plants and traditional pharmacopoeias.

Jacques Fleurentin, a pharmacist, went to Yemen as a cooperator in the French Medical Mission, where he spent three years conducting surveys among healers to record their therapeutic knowledge.

Back in France, he created and directed Jean-Marie Pelt's research laboratory at the University of Metz, developing animal and cell study techniques to demonstrate the therapeutic effects of plants from traditional medicines.

This experience in Yemen, involving collaboration between pharmacists, ethnologists, and botanists, allowed him to develop a new discipline, ethnopharmacology, whose goal is to valorize local medicinal resources to create new medicines.

This work describes the field methods, recounts the adventures encountered during the surveys, and shows the importance of historical, cultural, and geobotanical knowledge of Yemen.

Four specific plants make Yemen the holder of an exceptional genetic heritage: frankincense, a mythical and therapeutic plant that has aroused the covetousness of all civilizations of the ancient world; coffee, which originated in this country and has disseminated its genes into coffee cultures throughout the planet; aloe, whose consumption as a medicinal and dermo-cosmetic plant is exploding; and qat, a shrub with stimulating leaves, rich in natural amphetamine.

Yemen is a country of exceptional beauty and legendary hospitality that today risks finding itself at the heart of political news.