Was there a “popular medicine” in early modern Europe? []

Abstract

This article considers the current trend to “problematise” popular culture, and with it the category “popular medicine” as established in the “popular errors” literature of the early modern period, and maintained in the modern era by folklorist‐doctors such as Guiseppe Pitrè. Recent social historians of medicine have been increasingly dismissive of notions of a separate, usually magical “popular medicine,” instead offering models of diffusion of medical knowledge from the centre to the periphery. Based on Italian evidence, this article argues that, although it is impossible to draw absolute distinctions between schooled medical professionals, ecclesiastical healers, and illiterate “wise‐women,” there were important differences in the guiding mentality behind each approach.