Rubbing black snail on the wart and piercing the creature with a thorn, the bumps will disappear. If you give a donkey some bread, it will treat him whooping cough. Mumps can be cured if rub your head on the pig's back. Now it may seem a little strange, but such folk remedies are an important part of human history. Traditional healing methods can help to learn more about daily life in the past and how belief systems developed.
In rural Ireland, the use of pigs to treat mumps and snails to treat warts are just a few of the hundreds of remedies that were once thought to be curative. To find out more, a team from Brunel University London combed a rare archive of 3,655 folk remedies first collected in the 1930s. to test an anthropological theory: people are more likely to turn to religious or supernatural remedies when the cause of an illness is unclear. Their findings are detailed in study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Creation of a folklore archive.
In 1937The Irish Folklore Commission, with the help of young researchers, has begun a project to document and collect forgotten Irish stories. In collaboration with the Irish Department of Education, the commission asked primary school students to document folklore in their communities. ABOUT 50,000 schoolchildren they were given notebooks and asked to interview their parents, grandparents and neighbors about local history, beliefs and healing practices.
“You have children interviewing older people,” Dr. Michael de Barraco-author of the study and psychologist says the statement. “Then these notebooks were brought back and copied by teachers… and recently they were digitized. It's a real treasure trove.”
As a result, the children collected stories folk life covering 55 topics covering everything from churning and games to the devastating effects of the Irish famine and sectarian violence. They wrote down these medicines in Irish and English and compiled documentation amounting to almost three-quarters of a million pages.
“These were not random traditions”
In this new study, the team focused on 35 diseases. “We wanted to know whether the logic of traditional medicine follows psychological patterns, and it does,” de Barra said. “The more vague or mysterious the disease, the more likely it is that the treatment will involve magic or religion.”
They asked two doctors rate each of these 35 diseases depending on how clear it seemed to the average person at the time, in terms of what caused the disease and what was happening in the body. Obvious cases such as cuts and sprains were noted as credible. Conditions such as tuberculosiswarts or epilepsy were called more mysterious.
“We found that illnesses with unknown causes are about 50% more likely to require religious or magical treatment,” added study co-author and psychologist. Dr. Ayana Willard.
Infectious diseases, including piggywhooping cough and scrofula (swelling of the neck, often caused by tuberculosis) are more often associated with supernatural medicines. This may be because diseases with unclear causes like this do not leave many obvious ways to act or intervene.
In terms of treatment, treatment methods range from religious acts (prayers over bleeding wounds, holy wells and sacred stones) to more magical methods. One particular medicine instructed parents to place the sick child under a donkey three times and then feed it bread, which the donkey breathed first. Another medicine claimed that the seventh son could cure anything if a worm was placed in his infant hand and kept there until he died.
“These were not random traditions,” de Barra said. “They reflected people’s need to understand and influence their health, especially when there were no real answers.”
Need for a solution
This study is based on earlier anthropological studies found that ritual behavior flourished under conditions of uncertainty, such as when fishermen prayed while heading into dangerous seas. The team argues that in these often frightening situations, belief systems fill in the gaps when nothing explains what is happening around us. While these beliefs are rooted in history and may seem strange by modern standards, the team believes they can still be applied.
“It’s very frustrating to just not have some form of solution,” de Barra said. “When there aren't particularly good medical solutions, I expect people to keep looking for something that makes sense.”
In future work, the team hopes to explore geographic spreading these beliefs using original school records from counties that participated in the Irish Folklore Commission project to trace how folk medicine traveled, clustered or disappeared.
“It’s such a rich resource and we still have a lot to discover,” de Barra said.
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