Doctoral Dissertation Research: Gender and Race in the History of Folk Medicine

During the last few decades, many parts of the world have witnessed the resurgence of midwifery and other traditional healing practices. Even in cities, sites where biomedicine has allegedly taken hold, there is a growing interest in medical alternatives. This contemporary phenomenon challenges the teleological framework of traditional histories of medicine that have long been interested in explaining the emergence of biomedicine, the professionalization of medicine, and relatedly, the medicalization of society, and calls for a longer examination of the history of folk medicine.

Following a long tradition of scholarship that questions unilinear narratives of scientific or medical modernity, this project argues that folk healers were, and remain to be, essential medical providers. Progress narratives that have presented them as superseded or ousted by the professional doctor are always created retrospectively by historians and fall into the trap of teleology.

This project establishes a conversation between past and present to investigate how present-day concerns shape the knowledge that is produced about the history of folk medicine, and conversely, how the past resonates in the lives of its current practitioners.

This longitudinal study reconstructs the lives of unlicensed midwives, healers, and surgeons, people who provided the bulk of medical care before the rise of biomedicine in towns and villages where there were few or no doctors. Three main questions drive this research: First, who provided the lion's share of medical care regionally before the rise of biomedicine, and what were the key medical practices involved that have so far eluded historical analysis?

Second, how did race and gender shape the medical interventions of folk healers? And third, how do contemporary narratives of scientific modernity inform the ways of understanding the history of folk medicine? This project focuses on the role of midwives, healers and surgeons as medical experts in criminal trials, civil trials, and their participation in municipal councils, all instances in which they provided medical certifications to townspeople.

Drawing on qualitative data gathered in multiple archives, this project analyzes how diverse actors (patients, judges, lawyers, and witnesses) upheld ideas of proper/improper behavior according to gender and race ideologies, and how medical practitioners challenged or reproduced such imaginaries in their medical practice. This project supplements archival research with interviews involving current folk healers, in order to reflect on: 1) how they conceive of the body, disease, and healing today; 2) how they understand their own past and history.

In doing so, this study aims to articulate the role of gender and race in the construction of medical expertise, and to elucidate how present-day concerns shape the knowledge that is produced about the past, and how the past resonates in the present.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.