February 9, 2004 African Herbal Medicine is Subject of February 23 Lecture

Joseph Nga, the son of a doctor in the West African nation of Cameroon, West Africa, will discuss “The Culture and Healing Power of African Herbal Medicine” at the Library of Congress at 1 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 23, in Dining Room A, sixth floor, James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington D.C. Sponsored jointly by the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division and the Science, Technology and Business Division, the lecture is free and open to the public. Tickets are not required.

Nga learned about herbal medicine and African healing practices from his father for nearly 20 years before moving to the United States to pursue graduate studies. He earned a master’s degree in biology from Appalachian State, followed by a second master’s degree in developmental studies and natural resource policy from George Washington University.

Building on an earlier presentation at the Library in which he compared and contrasted traditional African healing protocols and alternative medicine in America, Nga will discuss how African healers interpret their cultural environments and manipulate plants and community resources to save lives. Using his father’s healing methods as a case study, he will explain how holistic herbal medicine is used in the West African culture.

The African and Middle Eastern Division was created in 1978. It comprises three sections - African, Hebraic and Near East, which cover some 70 countries and regions from Southern Africa to the Maghreb and from the Middle East to Central Asia. The division holds some 600,000 volumes in the non-Roman script languages of the region.

The Library of Congress maintains one of the largest and most diverse collections of scientific and technical information in the world. The Science, Technology and Business Division provides reference and bibliographic services and develops the general collections of the Library in all areas of science, technology, business and economics, with the exception of clinical medicine and technical agriculture, which are the subject specialties of the National Library of Medicine and the National Agricultural Library.