Numerous small-scale population movements have also taken place
within Europe over the centuries. Studying folk medical knowledge provides
one of the few ways of mapping the cultural experience of these different
migrant populations and their adaptation to new environments. Take, for
example, the Tabarkins of south-west Sardinia. They are the ancestors of
Genoese migrants who, in the sixteenth century, colonised the small island
of Tabarka off the Tunisian coast. After two centuries they were forced to
flee to Sardinia where they founded their own communities. Researchers
recently studied their folk phytotherapy and found that nothing significant
remained of their north African experience. But, while they had evidently
adopted Sardinian herbal medical traditions, their Genoese heritage was still
apparent in their names for local plants.^43 A study of the remnant elderly
Istro-Romanian community, the origins of which date back to the four-
teenth-century migration of people from the Carpathian basin to the Istrian
peninsula in Croatia, found evidence of the survival of some distinctive
ethnic folk medical practices, including the prominent use of vinegar from
wild apples in a variety of remedies, and houseleek (Sempervivum tectorum)
for ear pain.^44 Comparisons with the ethnobotany of the diverse mix of
Slovenian, Croatian, German and Italian peoples in and around the penin-
sula suggest that the acculturation process, and consequent loss of ethno-
botanical diversity, might be more ‘intense than in other “less multi-cultural”
migration contexts’, such as the aforementioned Albanian communities in
Basilicata in southern Italy.^45
The history of medicine and colonialism has until recently usually
consisted of a narrative of, first, the influence of Galenic medical theory
on indigenous folk medicine, and then the spread of western medical
bioscience. Yet the path of transmission of medical knowledge was by no
means all one way. In eighteenth-century Portugal, healers of African
descent, who were brought to the country as slaves either directly from
Africa or more commonly from Brazil, attracted considerable renown for
their curative powers. The Portuguese Inquisition tried between 15 and 20
healers in the period, among them Maria Grácia, a 40-year-old Angolan
slave owned by a wool contractor in Evora. She was tried in 1724 for curing
witchcraft-inspired illnesses and the ‘malady of the moon’. Her Christian
charms did not owe anything to her Angolan homeland, however, but the
exoticism of her skin colour and African heritage lent her and other Luso-
African healers, women in particular, popular esteem among the Portuguese
for their possession of occult knowledge.^46
As is being increasingly realised, the study of European folk medicine also
needs to consider the experiences and practices of those overseas migrant
communities that have settled in significant numbers over the last 50 years.
Research has recently been conducted, for example, on folk medicine among
Thai women in Sweden, Surinamese immigrants in Amsterdam and Sikh
Traditional European folk medicine | 35