texts, such as the first printed Polish herbal, Stefan Falimirz’s On Herbs and
their Power, published in 1534.^33 Astrology was an integral aspect of the
print herbal manuals just as it was in oral tradition, and trying to unpick the
influence of one on the other is an almost impossible task.
The medical recipes and notions of the ancient physicians also found
their way into hugely popular manuals containing the ‘secrets’ of the natural
world. One of the most influential of these books was falsely attributed
to the mediaeval German Dominican friar and scientist Albertus Magnus
(about 1193–1280), though most of its contents were culled from Pliny and
works alleged to have been written by Aristotle. Le Grand Albert, as it came
to be known in France, began to be sold in a cheap format in the eighteenth
century, and its spread to French colonies in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean
region had a considerable influence on folk medical traditions there.^34 The
almanac, which was the most popular literary format from the late seven-
teenth to the twentieth century, was another important source of medical
knowledge that both informed and borrowed from folk medicine. Almanacs
published in Estonia between 1731 and 1900 included information about the
use of around 55 medicinal plants.^35
In the eighteenth century there was also a boom in ‘rational’ self-help
medical manuals for the home.^36 This domestic medicine was, in part, an
attempt to eradicate the influence of ‘superstitious’ oral folk medicine, but
it was also a response to the widely recognised inadequacies of formal
medical provision in servicing the poor. As Christian Mangor noted in his
Norwegian Lande-apothek(Country Apothecary), first published in 1767
and reprinted numerous times over the next century, such works were
important as ‘few can afford medicines from the apothecary, let alone the
cost of a doctor’s travel, time, and trouble’.^2 Mangor recommended various
garden herbs and was particularly keen on the healing powers of elderberry.
Some authors were also inspired by concerns over the quality of officially
prescribed medicines. In the 1760 edition of his Primitive Physic, John
Wesley said of the apothecary: ‘perhaps he has not the drug prescribed by
the physician, and so puts in its place “what will do as well.” Perhaps he has
it; but it is stale and perished’. Better to trust one’s own ingredients and
experience in cases of minor ailments. Wesley was, of course, the founder of
Methodism, and we see elsewhere the evangelical Protestantimpulse for self-
help in bodily as well as spiritual care. In Estonia, for example, several
German pastors produced influential health guides for the common people,
such as Otto Jannau’s Country People’s Home Doctor or a Short Guide how
Every Reasonable Person in His House and Family Can Help if Somebody
is Sick, but Doctor is Unavailable(1857).^33
Medical print culture was by no means devoid of the magic woven into
the oral tradition of medicine. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century France
numerous editions of the cheap self-help guide Le Médecin des pauvres
Traditional European folk medicine | 33