James A. Duke (4 April 1929 – 10 December 2017) was an American botanist. He was the author of numerous publications on botanical medicine, including the CRC Handbook of Medicinal Herbs. He was well known for his 1997 bestseller, The Green Pharmacy. He developed the Dr. Duke's Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases at the USDA.

Biography

Jim Duke was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He received his doctorate in botany from the University of North Carolina in 1961. While in college he played in a Dixieland Jazz Band. He wrote poems which he set to music about herbs, their proper and common names, and some of their properties. During the late 1970s, he was chief of the Plant Taxonomy Laboratory, Plant Genetics and Germplasm Institute of the Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. He taught at the Maryland University of Integrative Health (formerly Tai Sophia) in Columbia, Maryland and led eco-botanical tours specializing in ethnobotany. Duke's work is cited with approval by Andrew Weil, a physician who maintains a health website that includes alternative medicine. Weil calls Duke "a leading authority on healing herbs".

Books by Duke