ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns a known, unknown or perhaps one might decide, an unknown. Like many of the papers emanating from Murray lasts seminal on the importance of knowing about not knowing, it is that author suspect what Caribbean Creoles term une histoire de fousa shaggy dog story. It comes from my ethnography of twenty-five years ago, in the northern village of Matelot in the West Indian island of Trinidad: in other words, before the recognition of AIDS and about the time when Professor Last was writing his paper. He was there looking at a new local religion but also the ethnobotany of the local Creoles. Popular medicine in Trinidad employs bush the leaves, flowers, barks, and roots of a variety of plants which can be used in conjunction with various commercial oils and essences. The Bush medicine is valued as traditional wisdom whose ready availability in villages like Pinnacle argues one superiority of rural life over that in town.
