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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.