Practitioners and their powers
Everyone could practise some elements of folk medicine, but certain sections
of the population were seen to have more experience, knowledge or ability
than others. Within family groups, women were usually the main practi-
tioners and principal repositories of healing knowledge. Recent studies have
found that they make up most of the remaining few traditional folk healers.
Women were thought to possess natural abilities for dealing with certain
problems, particularly those associated with childbirth and children. As
literacy levels were much lower among women than men in much of Europe,
until the advent of compulsory education, women were also more associated
with oral traditions of medical knowledge, such as obtaining healing gifts
from the fairy realm. Furthermore, the fact that, until the late nineteenth
century, women were largely excluded from licensed medical practice meant
that as healers they were systematically classified both at the time and by
later historians as belonging to unofficial categories of medicine, labelled
variously as ‘unqualified’, ‘alternative’, ‘casual’, ‘popular’ or ‘folk’.28,29
Certain male occupations, particularly shepherds, cowherds and black-
smiths, also accrued healing reputations from the knowledge that they were
thought to gain through their experience and intimacy with animals and
natural forces.
Healing skills could be a birthright. Seventh sons and daughters, for
example, were commonly thought to have an innate healing ability, as were
those born in a caul. In Catalonia those born on certain saints days were
given specific powers. So those born on St Judas’s Day could heal wounds
by sucking on them.^30 Secret knowledge and skills could also be inherited.
The tradition of charming, an integral aspect of European folk medicine
based primarily on verbal or written charms containing biblical passages,
apocrypha and stories of mythical encounters, was passed down through
families from generation to generation, sometimes contrasexually, in other
words from male to female and vice versa.31,32Folk medical knowledge
could also be acquired from outside the oral tradition of families and close-
knit communities.
Although the folk medicine of some societies on other continents has
been, and still is, a purely oral tradition, the history of its development and
nature in Europe cannot be understood without recognition of the influence
of print culture. The importance of ancient medical writings has already
been noted. With the advent of print in the late fifteenth century, and the
significant growth of literacy across much of northern and western Europe
in the following centuries, access to medical literature spread far beyond the
libraries of the clergy and licensed physicians. Some of the earliest secular
books to be printed were herbals. The Herbarius, published in Mainz in
1485, was particularly influential, being the source of numerous subsequent
32 |Traditional medicine