Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Professor Violetta HionidouORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Western literature has focused on medical plurality but also on the pervasive existence of quacks who managed to survive from at least the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Focal points of their practices have been their efforts at enrichment and their extensive advertising. In Greece, empirical, untrained healers in the first half of the twentieth century do not fit in with this picture. They did not ask for payment, although they did accept ‘gifts’; they did not advertise their practice; and they had fixed places of residence. Licensed physicians did not undertake a concerted attack against them, as happened in the West against the quacks, and neither did the state. In this paper, it is argued that both the protection offered by their localities to resident popular healers and the healers’ lack of demand for monetary payment were jointly responsible for the lack of prosecutions of popular healers. Moreover, the linking of popular medicine with ancient traditions, as put forward by influential folklore studies, also reduced the likelihood of an aggressive discourse against the popular healers. Although the Greek situation in the early twentieth century contrasts with the historiography on quacks, it is much more in line with that on wise women and cunning-folk. It is thus the identification of these groups of healers in Greece and elsewhere, mostly through the use of oral histories but also through folklore studies, that reveals a different story from that of the aggressive discourse of medical men against quacks.
Author(s): Hionidou V
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Medical History
Year: 2016
Volume: 60
Issue: 4
Pages: 492-513
Print publication date: 01/10/2016
Online publication date: 15/09/2016
Acceptance date: 19/04/2016
Date deposited: 16/06/2016
ISSN (print): 0025-7273
ISSN (electronic): 2048-8343
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2016.57
DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2016.57
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
