Participants in the Maymester program enjoy a break in Varna, Bulgaria.
JOURNEY TO THE BALKANS As many of their peers prepared for summer vacation, 13 USC School of Pharmacy undergraduates traveled throughout southeastern Europe for the Maymester class Balkan History, Geography and Folk Medicine. The 20-day trip was led by course instructor Terry David Church, assistant director of undergraduate education and a faculty member in the school’s Department of Regulatory and Quality Sciences.
properties of honey and local herbs, and a trip to a hot spring in Greece to learn about hydrothermal medicines. The students also learned about the medicinal properties of regional plants from professors at the Istanbul University Faculty of Pharmacy in Turkey, Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Romania, and Medical University of Sofia Faculty of Pharmacy in Bulgaria.
The itinerary took students through parts of Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and Turkey to explore folk medicine’s evolutions, benefits and consequences as well as sustainability. “We also learn about the cultures, histories and experiences of the people in these countries,” Church says of the course.
“This trip really opened my eyes to the endless possibilities and applications of plants in the world of medicine,” Pharmacology and Drug Development (PDD) student Jack Saville says. “Every professor at the universities we visited stressed how important it was for their pharmacy students to be able to identify plants that could be used to help treat patients.”
Stone & Compass—a nonprofit educational and cultural organization that partnered with USC in offering the trip—hosted the students at its 2,000acre property in the Balkan Mountains and helped coordinate excursions. Highlights included a botanical and bee farm tour that detailed the healing
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Recent PDD graduate Samantha Skinner adds that she was fascinated to learn about the terms “pharmacognosy” and “phytopharmacology,” both of which relate to the study of medicines from plant sources. “Pharmacists in other parts of the world take botany
classes and familiarize themselves with the therapeutic properties of plants—something pharmacists in the U.S. don’t have much knowledge about,” she notes. Students also attended planning meetings for a new clinic being built in the Bulgarian village of Stolat by Stone & Compass, which is committed to building global partnerships and projects that help those in need. Second-year PDD student Mikey Null gained perspective into the challenges arising from how the region’s natives view traditional Western medicine. “Running a small healthcare clinic is much more complex than I had initially thought,” Null says. “We had to learn how to cater to both Western and folk medicine, without excluding one or the other in meeting health needs.” “Travel is a phenomenal way of learning new things. It builds creativity and makes for a more dynamic thinker,” Church says.