Honey, Mud, Maggots and Other Medical Marvels: Science Behind Folk Remedies and Old Wives' Tales

Root-Bernstein, Robert Scott

ISBN 10: 0333750381 / ISBN 13: 9780333750384

Published by Macmillan, 1999

About this Item

Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. A copy that has been read but remains in clean condition. All of the pages are intact and the cover is intact and the spine may show signs of wear. The book may have minor markings which are not specifically mentioned.

Seller Inventory # rev7984538053

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Honey, Mud, Maggots and Other Medical Marvels: Science Behind Folk Remedies and Old Wives' Tales
• Publisher: Macmillan
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0333750381
• ISBN 13: 9780333750384
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Good
• Weight: 410 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Many modern medical practices began as old wives' tales of folk remedies. This text investigates a multicultural variety of age-old remedies often dismissed by 20th-century Western medicine as harmful or foolish but now shown to have real scientific validity. This text calls upon the medical establishment to open itself up to the possibilities of alternative therapies - remedies that have withstood the test of time precisely because they work. The authors take an excursion into the world of folk medicine, unearthing stories that range widely across time and place, fron ancient Egypt to the rain forests of contemporary Latin America. The notion that modern clinical practice is the only effective medicine is challenged and current research verifies the biochemical bases for the efficacy of supposedly outdated practices.

Review

When we think about the past, we are all guilty of what the historian E.P.Thompson called "the massive condescension of posterity". This has often been particularly true of medicine, where we look at old folk remedies, and at the assumptions of earlier generations of doctors. Knocking on the head wrong ideas about how the body worked, like the four humours, or how the universe worked, like astrology, should not be the same thing as ditching techniques, which, crude and low-tech and disgusting as they may have been, may have worked. Current researchers and practitioners are re-evaluating such things as leeches, bleeding and the packing of wounds with maggots or honey; the problem turns out to have been less that these did not work, as that the theories as to why they worked were inadequate, which meant that sometimes they were misused disastrously. Not all folk remedies are a good idea, but others, like vaccination, and the use of willow-bark, as aspirin, or fox-glove, as digitalis, are so common that we have forgotten their origins. The Root-Bernsteins are a little gung-ho about this, but their passionate advocacy is for the most part useful, clear and sensible. --Roz Kaveney