Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Showcase 1. Doctors, Ethnographers and Folklorists

Casal, G., 1762. Historia natural, y medica del principado de Asturias (Google eBook), Oviedo: Principado de Asturias.


Castañega, F.M. de, [1529] 1946. Tratado de las supersticiones y hechicerías. Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles.


Erkoreka, A., 1985. Análisis de la medicina popular vasca. Editorial Lugar.


Hipócrates, 1986. Sobre los aires aguas y lugares. In J. A. López-Férez, ed. Tratados hipocráticos. Madrid: Editorial Gredos.


Kuczinsky, M., [1944] 2004.  La Vida en la Amazonía peruana: observaciones de un médico. Lima: Fondo Editorial Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.


Lis Quibén, V., 1949. La medicina popular en Galicia. Pontevedra, Gráficas Torres. Ediciones Celta.


Millet, A., [1798] 1992. La topografía médica de Vic, edited by JM López Gómez. Barcelona: PPU.


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Hippocrates' treatise Airs, Waters and Places was a guide for observing the environment and its connections to the people who inhabit it. It is the first systematic attempt to compile data on the relations between disease, physical place, culture and society. Its naturalistic gaze influenced later writing in many forms: the ethnographic writers of classical antiquity, the writing of medieval and Renaissance missionaries and the missionaries of modern Europe, and the doctors who wrote geographies, sociomedical reports and medical topographies following the recommendations of Pinel and others, and studies of folk medicine and medical folklore as late as the second half of the 20th century. Folklorists in Europe and evolutionary anthropologists in America also studied local medical categories. Some 19th century anthropologists such as Bourke took an interest in North American medicine men, and Black used folk medicine to discuss evolutionary approaches to culture history.       

The concept of folk medicine, translated into Romance languages as "popular medicine", emerged in the last third of the 19th century in Italian and Spanish medical texts. In Italy, Giuseppe Pitrè (1846-1910) published his Medicina popolare siciliana and proposed a new methodology specifically conceived for fieldwork and based on the taxonomic and narrative model of pathology in experimental clinical medicine. His work had no influence on the new social anthropology developing in Great Britain following the Torres Straits expedition of 1898. One of the participants in this expedition, the anthropologist and neuropsychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers, kept his clinical and anthropological work separate until World War I. After the war's end he began to combine them, but his posthumously published book Medicine, Magic and Religion, written for an audience of his medical colleagues, was not conceived as a methodological contribution. Nevertheless, there are many examples in the 20th century of ethnographic studies written by doctors with the aim of improving health. Among these, the work of Kuczynski is particularly noteworthy for its medical and Marxist interpretation of North American culturalism. After World War II some doctors and folklorists continued to publish studies of medical folklore when medical anthropology had already begun to develop as a specialized field in its own right.


Amade s, J., [1969] 1980. Folklore de Catalunya. Barcelona: Selecta. 


Anon, [1726] 1754. Cartas edificantes y curiosas: escritas de las missiones estrangeras, Volume 5, Madrid: en la imprenta de la Viuda de Manuel Fernandez y del Supremo Consejo de la Inquisicion.


Black, W.G., [1881] 1982. Medicina Popular. Un capítulo en la historia de la cultura. Barcelona, Alta-Fulla. Facsimile from the translation to Spanish by Antonio Machado y Álvarez (1889), Barcelona: Alta-fulla.


Bourke, J. G., [1891] 1968. Scatologic rites of all nations. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation.


Pares y Franqués, J., [1778] 1998.  Catástrofe morboso de las minas mercuriales de la Villa de Almadén del Azogue. Edited by Alfredo Menéndez-Navarro. Cuenca: Universidad Castilla la Mancha.


Pinel, Philippe [1801]1803. Nosografía Filosófica, Tomo II. Aplicación del método analítico a la medicina. Madrid, Imprenta Real.


Pitrè, G., 1896. Medicina popolare siciliana, Palermo: Carlo Clausen.


Rivers, W.H., [1922] 2010.  Medicina ,  magia   i  religió. Catalan translation with a foreword by Ángel Martínez-Hernáez. Tarragona: Publicacions URV.


Rodríguez-López, J., [1891] 1971. Supersticiones de Galicia y preocupaciones vulgares 3a ed., Lugo: Ediciones Celta.


SaintYves. 1985. Las madres vírgenes y los embarazos milagrosos: ensayo de mitología comparada. Madrid: Akal, D.L.


Sevilla de, I., [1924] 2004. Etimologías. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores  Cristianos.