Elvin-Lewis received the award for her "outstanding work in the field of traditional medicine." Her career in ethnobotany and traditional medicine has taken her to South America, Africa and India, where she has collected and analyzed plants for their potential medical benefit and observed different ethnic uses of plants used for medicine and for oral health.

Memory P. Elvin-Lewis, Ph.D., professor of microbiology and ethnobotany in biomedicine in Arts & Sciences, recently was awarded the Martin de la Cruz medal for "outstanding work in the field of traditional medicine."

Elvin-Lewis was one of approximately 400 researchers attending the 15th International Congress of Traditional and Alternative Therapies, sponsored by the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana. Elvin-Lewis also presented the conference keynote address, "Therapeutic Evaluation of Hepatitis Remedies: The Usefulness of Ethnomedical Focusing Techniques."

Last year, Elvin-Lewis' husband, Walter H. Lewis, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts & Sciences and a longtime collaborator of his wife's, also was a recipient of the medal.

The medal is presented in honor of de la Cruz, who, as an Aztec healer, was the first indigenous person in the New World to provide data about medicinal plant uses. His body of knowledge was published as a book in 1552, well before an English-language medicinal herb volume mainly about European species was published in 1597.

For centuries, there were only two copies of de la Cruz's book, and their whereabouts were unknown. In the 1920s, the original was found in a Vatican library. Since then, many facsimiles have been produced, and one is in the Missouri Botanical Garden collection.

Elvin-Lewis is an internationally known ethnobotanist who perhaps is best known in collaborating with Walter Lewis on numerous trips to the Peruvian rainforests since the early 1980s to learn about the medicinal plants used by the native tribes. Actually, it was Elvin-Lewis's National Geographic Grant to study methods of tooth blackening and tooth extraction that initially took the Lewises to Peru and Colombia in the first place. From this beginning, their collaboration continued for two decades in the Peruvian Amazon.

But Elvin-Lewis has also done important work in determining the value of plants used in ethnodentistry in Africa, the West Indies, India and elsewhere and has served as a World Health Organization consultant in this respect. By evolving a method she called "ethnomedical/dental focusing," it was possible to determine, with the aid of specialist scientists and clinicians alike, the relative value of plants used to prevent or treat specific diseases.

This involved deriving a consensus of value for remedies used throughout a population by acquiring information from either individuals that used the remedies and/or from practitioners that prescribed them, and proving that these preferences had value when allopathic and scientific criteria were applied.

In collaboration with scientists and students at the University of Ghana, it was possible to identify the relative value of 173 plants known to be used for teeth-cleaning among 11 linguistic groups. Of the seven proving most popular, all were shown to possess significant bioreactivity against organisms known to cause tooth decay.

Elvin-Lewis' research in India next focused upon understanding the value of each plant contained in mixed plant formulations used in dental health and included detailed studies with collaborators here on the clinical value and anti-odontopathic value of neem. This concept was then applied to understanding the value of plants used in the Amazon, and in particular those remedies valued in the treatment of hepatitis, proving again that favored selections confer the best efficiency and bioreactivity.

She also played a role in identifying what is considered by many to be the first death from AIDS in this country in 1969. Elvin-Lewis, who was then studying chlamidial infections, preserved body fluids and tissues of a St. Louis teen-age boy who died in 1969 from mysterious complications of a severe chlamidial infection. Normally chlamydia is a curable sexually transmitted disease, so this case remained an enigma for some time.