contained traditional healing charms. Its popularity may have created a
certain degree of uniformity in the charming tradition as the print versions
of the charms seeped into the oral and manuscript record of healing knowl-
edge.37,38Literacy and literature were also important to the success and
influence of two important categories of European folk healer. The ‘quack
doctor’ or charlatanwas defined, in part, by the entrepreneurial exploita-
tion of newspaper advertising, handbills and bogus certificates of official
sanction. Quacks vaunted their scientific credentials, but in practice often
relied on what were seen by the eighteenth-century medical establishment as
either fraudulent facsimiles of orthodox medicine or miraculous, herbal or
sympathetic modes of folk medical cure.39,40 The reputations of many
‘cunning-folk’, who offered a wide range of magical solutions for everyday
misfortunes in matters of health, love and money, made considerable
play on their possession of books of magic, astrology and herbalism. In
folk culture books were thought to contain secret knowledge otherwise
unobtainable in the oral medical tradition.
Cultural exchange
We need to be aware of the non-European influences on the history of Euro-
pean medicine. The importance of Arabic science and medicine during the
mediaeval period is well recorded. In Europe much knowledge of classical
medicine was lost for centuries after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and
so the Arabic world became the main repository of ancient Greek and
Roman medical theory. Most of Galen’s writings had been translated into
Arabic by the tenth century, and it was largely thanks to mediaeval Arab
and Jewish scholars in Spain and Constantinople that Galenic theory came
to dominate European medicine until the eighteenth century. As well as this
crucial role in the development of orthodox western medicine, the Moorish
populations of Spain, and Jewish communities across Europe, maintained
distinctive folk medical traditions, the practitioners of which were also
consulted by Christians. During the sixteenth century the secular authorities
and the Inquisition in Spain made a concerted effort to suppress Muslim
physicians and Arabic texts, denigrating Arabic–Galenic medicine. As a
consequence, over the next few centuries Moorish medical practitioners
largely operated within the magical–medical context of curandismo, prac-
tising herbalism, using charms, and curing and diagnosing based on the
Islamic tradition that diseases were embodied by demons or djinns.^41 The
influence of this Moorish cultural heritage is still clearly evident in Spanish
magical healing traditions today. As a study of folk medicine in Murcia in
south-eastern Spain observed, the Latin, Moorish and Jewish medical
traditions in the region’s folk belief and practice are so entwined that it is a
difficult task to disentangle them.^42
34 |Traditional medicine