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This project came about when I joined the Digital Divide Project, a program that introduces minority high school students to health care professions. Over the course of a school year, they visit different colleges (each part of UF's Health Science Center) for about six months. Each student designs a web project that shows an interest in the history of health care. For my project, in order to cover what I've learned and researched I chose to do an essay showing a brief summary of general history, as well as collections of folktales, and folklore pertaining to each of the colleges I attended: pharmacy, medicine, nursing, health professions, dentistry, and veterinary medicine. The summaries focus on general history of western medicine and show the general form of medicine and changes from the Middles Ages until the present.
Folk medicine and modern medicine are different, however they coexist in the world today. Folk medicine is a field where people who are not formally trained, such as homemakers, and midwives, or who are trained through apprenticeship, such as root doctors, have used cures or remedies for years. It's something that your parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc. might have just tried and it seemed to work. Therefore, they began to use that cure and passed it down from generation to generation. Many times, folk cures worked and herbs such as foxglove were adopted by regular or allopathic doctors.
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In the past regular medicine did not have a means of testing cures using statistics. On the other hand modern medicine is something that has been tested in a planned and orderly fashion numerous times and has worked. With modern medicine what the remedy is made of, how it affects the body, and things of that nature determine whether it is used as a medicine or not so chosen for a number of reasons, and not just whether it seems to cure an illness. Doctors who practice regular medicine are trained formally in schools and have to be licensed in order to practice legally.
Folk medicines and beliefs, although they tend to have a similar basic structure, can vary from region to region. In fact, every region and country of the world has practiced some type of folk medicine, and although the people may have been thousands of miles away from each other, many systems of folk practice had similarities in basic beliefs. It is interesting to see how such ideasmight vary from culture to culture or as they were brought to different societies.
For instance both the Anglo-Saxons and the Greeks believed in the balance of the 4 humours. However, what the humours were wasn't quite the same. For the Anglo-Saxons they were humours in the head, blood in the breast, rough bile In the intestines, and the black bile within the gall bladder. The Greeks believed that they were blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm (there will be more talk on Greek humours later). Most folk practices did use natural and supernatural cures, and both supernatural and natural were used together all over the world.
These two fields still coexist in the world today. Though the means of choosing practitioners, training them and practicing are different, the two forms of medical practice also are not always at odds. The reason they coexist is that scientists have tested remedies discovered by our ancestors and determined that some of them really work.