Handbook of African Medicinal Plants 2nd Ed

The first edition of the Handbook of African Medicinal Plants was published in 1993 to provide a concise and easy reference of the major medicinal plants of Africa and an introduction to traditional African medicine. It presented a collation of the key literature available at that time on the description, constituents, and uses of the plants; this information was otherwise scattered in several publications. The volume addressed the needs of those involved in the discovery and development of modern medicines from African plants, as well as the interests of practitioners of herbal medicine who needed information on the plants used in African ethnomedicine. The book was well received by scholars in both academia and industry as a source of secondary information on the plants it covered. After 20 years, it has become necessary to revise and review the volume not only to update the literature on the medicinal plants covered in the first edition of the book but also to provide an objective review of the plants that have come into current use as phytomedicines and were largely unknown in 1993. The status of some of the plants as major herbal medicines has also changed dramatically during these two decades.