Book Review

摘要

Dana Dalrymple describes himself as ‘an agricultural economist by vocation and a historian by avocation’ so it should come as no surprise that it was while on secondment from the US Department of Agriculture in 2004 that the seed of his obsession with the herbal antimalarial was planted. Dalrymple’s assignment was to write a ‘modest briefing paper’ that could inform the US Agency for International Development’s technical support to farmers in East Africa who were cultivating for use in artemisinin-derived combination therapies (ACTs). But his retirement in 2008 did nothing to curb his growing obsession and he spent the next four years gathering further material. The result, replete with 1450 references, is what amounts to a very useful overview of the scientific and public policy literature on artemisinin, one that should serve as a primer to both historians of medicine and historians of public health. In the course of tracing artemisinin’s odyssey from a forgotten Chinese cure for haemorrhoids to the World Health Organization’s current front-line treatment for malaria in Africa and Asia, Dalrymple also makes some highly salient observations about the tension between Western pharmaceutical science and traditional medical belief systems, one that may yet determine whether artemisinin lives up to its hype as the world’s current ‘best hope’ of controlling the deadly parasitical disease.