Abstract
Folk medicine has fallen under the purview of folkloristics since the latter’s prehistory in the seventeenth-century writings of John Aubrey; nevertheless, the field has long been relegated to subordinate status and rarely considered as a source of new disciplinary perspectives. Although folklorists now contribute to contemporary medical debates, research on health has seldom gained the visibility in folklore studies that it has enjoyed recently in anthropology, sociology, and science-technology-society (STS) studies. Here I point to some of the historical strengths of the field of folk medicine and suggest how they can resonate with research advances in these other fields. Rather than advocating that folklorists follow other disciplinary leads, this article proposes a framework and methodology for overcoming entrenched assumptions and tackling the complex ethnographic and analytic work that would be required to develop a comprehensive folkloristics of health.
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