Encyclopedia of Folk Medicine: Old World and New World Traditions

This encyclopedia has a tighter focus than its title suggests. Gabrielle Hatfield almost exclusively focuses on British and British-derived North American vernacular medicine from the sixteenth century to the present. There are some 242 alphabetically arranged entries, including 13 on “people” (5 on specific individuals, the others on occupations or social roles such as the midwife or the seventh son), 100 on “ailments” (which, in addition to illnesses, include problems such as drunkenness, bad breath, contraception, cuts, hunger, and so forth), 117 on “healing agents” (from cayenne and horehound to dead man’s hand and toads and frogs), 8 on “ideas” (amulet, doctrine of signatures, and so forth), and 5 on “cultural traditions” outside the Anglo-American mainstream that the book is about (African, Celtic, Mexican, Native American, and Shaker, each very briefly treated). Most entries are between a page and a page and a half long, while a few are as short as half a page. A handful are as long as three or four pages.

A Scottish botanist, Hatfield writes clearly, balances ideas well, and documents copiously, using parenthetical notes that refer to full bibliographic entries given at the end of every article. Rather than repeating the full citation, putting them at the end of the volume would have saved considerable space; half a dozen central reference works receive full citations roughly a hundred times each. Perusing the individual essays can be useful, and just thumbing through the book is rewarding, too. One might think of looking up “ginger” or “ginseng,” “eczema” or “epilepsy,” but it is hard to imagine deliberately seeking out “dew” or “freckles” (a blight for which remedies were apparently sought repeatedly). I looked carefully at the entry for the humble potato, treated in two pages of prose followed by a page of references (spanning pp. 276 9). The potato has been employed—raw, cooked, peeled, carried as an amulet (I intend to take this up), in a sock, or even cut into pieces and thrown away—to treat over fifty ailments, from appendicitis, asthma, and back pain to ulcers, warts, and wounds. Since the entry is organized in part geographically, some of these ailments appear repeatedly within it. All uses are referenced, but, with this large a number of uses cited in so little space, there is no room to explore beyond manner of use (poultice, in a tea, and so forth). One can get some idea of how important a given remedy was for a given ailment by going to the corresponding entry: the ailment “rheumatism” is mentioned more often in the article on the potato than the reverse. Cross-checking also reveals plenty of the sorts of errors that will always dog encyclopedists: “eczema” appears in the article on the potato, but “potato” does not come up in the “eczema” article, despite a reference to that article in the “potato” entry. Nevertheless, this is a valiant first effort at bringing together a considerable body of information. Even though the individual entries are short, Hatfield’s catholic approach to selecting topics for articles and the thoroughness with which the entries are documented will make this a helpful source for those researching British and British-derived American folk medicine.