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

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 KaveneyRead More