The possible integration of traditional medical practitioners into our state health care system, which is in line with recommendations of the World Health Organization and South Africa's new reconstruction and development policy, means that there is a need for rapid development of ethnopharmacological expertise within South Africa. This is made more urgent by the threatened conservation status of many of our medicinal plants. It is further exacerbated by the great interest now being focused on plants, especially those from developing countries, as the source of potential new products for the more industrialised countries. While Zulu traditional medicine is probably the best documented of all South African ethnomedical systems, the records have become scattered and are not easily available. The discipline is, however, very widely practised and Zulu medicinal plants are traded and used all over southern Africa. In this book we report on Zulu usage of 1 032 species from 537 genera and 147 families. At least a third of these species were not recorded at all in the last work to pay extensive attention to the medicinal and poisonous properties of South African plants, Watt and BreyerBrandwijk's monumental 1962 edition of The Medicinal and Poisonous Plants of Southern and Eastern Africa. We have also been able to update information on scientific investigations of these plants, some of which have been extensively studied outside South Aftica. Many of the other plants have, however, not been screened and very little is known scientifically about them. We have therefore tried to provide a broader context by using a phylogenetic arrangement and including a brief outline of family chemistry and indications of bioactivity, pharmacological usage and potentially toxic principles known within the genus. There are many indications of scientific support for traditional treatment or potential therapeutic usage shown in this book. We hope that it will stimulate further research to validate traditional claims. Such studies would facilitate the overdue acceptance of traditional healing as a valued resource in our state health system and could provide leads to new drug discovery or to the use of indigenous herbal medicine to enhance orthodox treatment. We hope too that the book will fulfil some of the needs felt by botanists, who are often asked questions about plant usage that they cannot answer, hospitals, who are occasionally faced with problems of poss ible herbal medicine over-dosage without knowing what medicines have been used, and traditional healers seeking some scientific information on the plants they use.

An account of the origins of Zulu medicine and medicine men and their impact on the Zulu nation from a cultural aspect.