Adaptation and transformation
There has been, and continues to be, a tendency to consider European folk
medicine, as well as other aspects of ‘folklore’, as bound to rural cultures. But,
as numerous studies of folk medicine in contemporary urban societies in the
Americas, Asia and Africa have shown, this is certainly not the case. In a histor-
ical context the same applies to Europe. Britain was the first industrial urban
nation and, although little work has been done on the issue, there is sufficient
evidence that folk medicine served an important function in this new way of life.
The industrial urban population may not have had the natural environment
around them to furnish the herbal ingredients of many traditional remedies, but
it did generate the huge expansion of herbalists, chemists and druggists shops,
which supplied herbs and substances for folk medical use along with dispensing
for licensed doctors.58,59Thanks to the frequent injuries that were the lot of
factory and mill workers, traditional medical arts, such as bone-setting,
essentially folk osteopathy, also thrived in the northern towns of England.^29
As to the continuation of traditional folk medicine today the pattern is
difficult to ascertain, and varies significantly within as well as between
countries. In terms of the survival of an oral tradition, folk medicine
remains strongest in Mediterranean and south-eastern European countries.
But the trend everywhere is undoubtedly one of considerable decline, with
older people now the last repositories of long-held knowledge. In Italy,
recent scholarly interest in the biomedical value of traditional herbal reme-
dies provides some sense of the continuation and decline of this aspect of
folk medical tradition in the early third millennium. In one mountainous
region of central southern Italy, researchers found that practical knowledge
of traditional natural remedies for human ailments was quickly being lost,
and the last in a long line of local folk healers had died in 2001. Elderly
female family members were still using a few remedies, such as adminis-
tering stinking tutsan (Hypericum hircinum) for colds. They gathered the
plant from the surrounding area and dried and stored it for winter.^60 Other-
wise, modern pharmaceuticals have almost entirely replaced traditional
medicines in much of Italy. Yet older people still know of and reminisce
about the great efficacy of well-known remedies even if they are no longer
used, remedies such as the latex of sea spurge (Euphorbia paralias) used by
fishermen in central Italy for assuaging the bite of weever fish.^61 The rate of
erosion is by no means uniform and is highly localised. In the hilly Molise
region of central southern Italy, for example, folk veterinary medicine had
apparently disappeared by 2003, whereas it has recently been described as
‘alive and well’ in some communities in the Alto Tirreno Cosentino area of
southern Italy.^62
In rural Spain too, the knowledge is restricted largely to older people, with
a study in 2007 warning that the loss of popular knowledge was becoming ‘an
Traditional European folk medicine | 37