communities in London.47,48In France over the last three decades immigrant
west and north African cunning-folk or marabouts, primarily from Senegal,
and most of whom adopted the trade after arriving in France, have been
successful in carving a niche in the commercial world of folk medicine,
magic and alternative healing by playing on their ‘unique’ ethnic knowl-
edge.49,50 Surprising historical connections emerge between the medical
heritage of migrants and their host communities. A study of traditional
medicines used by a Pakistani migrant community in Bradford, England,
reveals that, although most of the herbal remedies used are not known in
the western tradition, the interviewees subscribe to the Unanimedical tradi-
tion, which developed in mediaeval Persia but was based on ancient Greek
humoral theory (Unanimeans Greek).^51
As well as the influence of population movements, European medicine
has also incorporated ingredients and substances imported through trade.
Even before European colonial expansion from the sixteenth century
onwards, ingredients had long arrived from the east. Cloves, mace and
nutmeg were being traded across Europe by the thirteenth century.^52 They
were expensive, of course, and largely the preserve of monastic medicine
rather than lay medical practice, but they would eventually find their way
into the domestic pharmacopoeia and onto the shelves of urban druggists
servicing industrialising populations. In nineteenth-century England the
popularity of nutmeg as a carminative for flatulence and dyspepsia created
a trade in portable nutmeg holders and graters. These were made of silver
for the wealthy, while rural craftsmen sold little wooden boxes in the form
of an acorn and the like for the humble.^53 Today, of course, ginseng and
Ginkgo bilobahave became an important part of self-medication in Europe.
Now little used in Europe, dragon’s blood, the blood-red resin of various
non-European trees, was used in the ancient world for medicinal purposes
and its use has spread to folk medical traditions around the world.^54
According to one Renaissance Florentine doctor its expense was such that
most dragon’s blood in apothecaries’ workshops was actually a mix of
sulphur and mercury boiled together.^55 It was used in ritual healing contexts
as well. One of the remedies for relieving the possessed suggested by Florian
Canale, an early modern Italian exorcist, involved a distillation including
dragon’s blood, ground glass, wax and turpentine.^56 The doctrine of signa-
tures dictated that the resin would be efficacious for bleeding, as several
popular eighteenth-century medical texts suggested. Editions of Aristotle’s
Compleat Master-piece, for instance, provided several remedies for ‘spitting
of blood’, usually associated with tuberculosis, including one that mixed
dragon’s blood with ‘frogspawn water’, ‘plantain water’ and syrup of roses.
It became a staple ingredient of chemists and druggists in the nineteenth
century, although often purchased by the poor for use in love divination
rituals rather than medicine.^57
36 |Traditional medicine