published accounts of the oral medical tradition provide an enduring record
that is easily accessible to all. Fieldwork in Estonia in 1999 found that healers
and wise-folk said that all their knowledge was taken directly from books, and
consequently that they could not provide information about the oral tradition
of folk medicine.^35 Folk medical texts are easily found in the eclectic mind,
body and spirit sections of high street bookshops and authoritative surveys of
ethnobotany sell well to the general public.71,72In Thessaloniki, herb traders
continue to sell in the city centre market much as they have done for over 500
years, and traditional empirics continue to set up their stalls in open-air
markets, while modern health food shops run by university-educated people
whose knowledge is largely book based also trade in them.^22 The viability of
the former is now surely increasingly tied to the influence of the latter.
The cultural distance between patient and official practitioner is no
longer as great is it was a century or more ago, and healthcare providers
have become more sensitised to patients’ conceptions of illness and cure.^73
But the distance has grown between consumers and the biomedical
industry.^74 The undercurrent of distrust in the absolutist position of the
biosciences is one reason why some people turn to reformulations of folk
medicine, whether they be European or borrowed from the traditions of
other continents. Concerns are amplified when scientific authority is period-
ically and often sensationally exposed as flawed. The growing influence of
the green movement has helped shape how Europeans respond to this. The
perceived benefits of the purity of self-made or natural remedies over pack-
aged, synthetic compounds are weighed up by many medical consumers – an
echo of the concerns expressed by John Wesley 250 years ago. Faith-based
healing strategies also continue to have a significant influence.
One recent factor affecting interest in and uptake of folk medicine, the
collapse of communism and the Eastern Bloc, highlights just how complex
the relationship is between conceptions of healing and broader social,
economic and political developments. One consequence has been the freeing
up of the medical market. In Poland, for instance, the state enterprise
monopoly on herbal drugs, ‘Herbapol’, was dismantled leading to the rapid
growth of private and cooperative herbal producers.^33 In post-Soviet Russia
there was a huge boom in magical and religious healers, with many adver-
tising their ‘traditional’ status in newspapers and on television. The religious
emancipation that also occurred has boosted this appeal to lay healing,
despite the condemnation of an increasingly influential Orthodox Church.^75
These trends have also been influenced by the growth of nationalist impulses
that promote notions and sentiments regarding the ‘traditional’ and an
idealisation of the rural past. In other words, healing traditions have been
used in the process of creating national identity. So folk medicine’s rich past
is also what continues to ensure its future.
Traditional European folk medicine | 39