WHAT'S IN THE DATABASE

This web site contains material from the UCLA Archive of American Folk Medicine established by Wayland D. Hand in the 1940's. The term "folk" medicine includes a variety of beliefs and practices such as home remedies, the activities of traditional healers (e.g., burn doctor, curandero, traiteur, powwower, and wise women), and many therapies that fall under the rubric of complementary and alternative medicine including herbals, laying on of hands, prayer, etc. About 10% of the entries derive from unpublished interviews. The majority of the records were extracted from thousands of published works, both popular and scientific, for which copyright release has been granted.

The collection is particularly rich in data from European, African, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American populations. While the emphasis is on American data, about one fifth of the material is from other countries. Approximately 1,000 medical conditions and 80 kinds of traditional healers are represented. Beliefs address more than an ailment; many concern the supernatural, the occult, luck, premonitions of death, prenatal influences marking a person, parts of the body as indicators of character traits, and so on.

This collection is intended as a resource for historical, sociological, and folkloristic research. Most of the American material was published in the 19th and 20th centuries, ending in the early 1970's. Because of the time in which they were documented and published, some entries contain racial epithets, obscene words, dubious beliefs, and dangerous practices; to change them, however, would distort the historical record.

Terms for medical conditions are in the vernacular. Plants, animals, and minerals usually bear common rather than scientific names because this is the way the information was recorded and published. Political boundaries and the names of countries remain as they were originally cited.

HOW TO USE THE ONLINE DATABASE

When he began the Archive of American Folk Medicine in the 1940's, Wayland D. Hand extracted texts from published and unpublished sources. This information was then indexed on 4" x 6" cards. The text usually consisted of a medical condition and its treatment. Occasionally the card contained the cause of an ailment or a means of avoiding the illness; or the condition was a state of good health rather than sickness. In other instances, the text concerns some part of the body serving, for example, as an indicator of character, ability, or intelligence.

A citation to the published or unpublished source always appeared on the card. Sometimes an archive card contained other information. This might include the informant's gender, age, and/or ethnicity; the city or state where the belief was collected; the region of the collection; the year or decade the item was collected; or the place of origin (usually a city, state, or country where the informant learned the belief, regardless of where it was collected).

USING THE STANDARD SEARCH OPTION

You might begin a search using a term for an ailment such as "headache." You could search for both the ailment and a therapy; for example, "headache" and "snakeroot." You may also search for a healing specialist (e.g., "shaman," "conjuror," "bloodstopper"), for supernatural entities ("animal spirits," "engkantos," "fairies"), for special abilities ("telepathy," "sixth sense"), or a wide variety of concepts ("emotions," "intellect," "luck," "prenatal influences," "charms").

The program searches the entire database (so the Standard Search is slower than the Advanced Search). Rather than displaying the belief, which might be a lengthy text, the results are displayed as "Condition" and as "Method of Treatment." Often there is enough information in the latter category for one to determine whether or not to examine the entire record. Be aware, however, that many beliefs concern matters beyond simply treating a condition; they embrace notions about the supernatural, the occult, and even luck. Therefore, the field "Method of Treatment" may be blank.

To search for the gender or ethnicity of the informant or the region in which the belief was collected or learned, use the "Advanced Search Option."

USING THE ADVANCED SEARCH OPTION

The 4" x 6" cards that formed the archive on which the present web site is based contained various kinds of information, but not everything that one might wish for; nor is the data consistent from one entry to another. This is because the published and unpublished sources varied in the amount and kinds of information they provided.

The available information has been organized into 12 searchable fields. These include "Condition," "Belief," "Method of Treatment," "Informant Gender," "Informant Age," "Informant Ethnicity," "Place Collected," "Region of Collection," "Date Collected," "Place of Origin," "Region of Origin," and "Citation."

Keep in mind that not all fields contain data. You might go to the original published source to see if the information is available somewhere in the article or book.

While an effort was made to be consistent in the use of terms in each field, more than two dozen people entered data on thousands of records over five years so errors occurred. Sometimes the very nature of the beliefs challenged attempts at categorizing.

THE FIELDS

Searchable fields include the following: "Condition," "Belief," "Method of Treatment," "Informant Gender," "Informant Age," "Informant Ethnicity," "Place Collected," "Region of Collection," "Date Collected," "Place of Origin," "Region of Origin," and "Citation."

Results of a search are displayed in two columns, one identified as "Condition" and the other as "Mode of Treatment." Entries in the latter are briefer than many texts in the "Belief" field would be and yet usually contain enough information to determine whether or not the record is of interest. The "Mode of Treatment" field may be empty, however, because the belief associated with the condition or situation does not focus on an ailment but on, for example, a spiritual agency, the transmission of knowledge among traditional healers, or ways of predicting the future from the circumstances of birth.

Although the fields "Volume Number" and "Page Number" appear in every record, they cannot be searched because they do not contain unique terms.

CONDITION
Sometimes more than one illness, or more than one name for the same ailment, is included in "Condition." When looking for a particular illness or disease, you might also search "Belief" because the text includes reference to the ailment as well as the treatment.

"Condition" includes more than disease, broken bones, and sickness. It also encompasses a state of good health and of well being, physical features, and even character traits.

In creating the folk medicine archive, its founder Wayland D. Hand held a broad conception of health and illness. For instance, he included beliefs about physical attributes because some people have considered them to be correlated with character traits that in turn affect others (e.g., their emotional health and well being) who interact with those possessing a trait. Some people contended that a left-handed person was destined to have bad luck, which includes ill health; hence, there were ways to predict left handedness, prevent it, and change it to right handedness. The "Condition" field, therefore, includes more concepts than one might have expected.

BELIEF
The "Belief" field contains all the information indexed on the original archive card concerning the treatment of a medical condition. It also refers to the ailment that is being treated.

As explained above regarding "Condition," Wayland Hand's conception of health and illness was broadly inclusive rather than exclusive. Therefore, some records retrieved through the "Belief" field include information about how to maintain health or avoid illness, ideas concerning the supernatural and the occult, and even ways to predict a person's character, abilities, and fortunes in life from physical attributes and circumstances of birth.

METHOD OF TREATMENT
The "Method of Treatment" field can be searched for any of five terms indicating how the therapy is administered. These include "ingested," "inhaled," "applied," "worn," and "performed." "Ingested" refers to eating or drinking a substance while "inhaled" concerns the breathing in of vapors, smoke, fragrances, etc. "Applied" includes salves, ointments, poultices, and splints. "Worn" refers to such treatments as pinning an asafetida bag on one's clothing or wearing camphor or a charm around the neck. "Performed" embraces a host of activities, largely ritualistic; for instance "To cure a wart, prick it, and wipe the drop of blood off with a rag; then bore a hole in a white oak tree, and put a peg in to hold the rag in place. Then whisper to the wart every night for nine nights, 'Be gone,' and it will disappear."

INFORMANT GENDER
The field "Informant Gender" contains the categories of "Female" and "Male." Gender in the original sources--if it was referred to at all--was represented in different ways, e.g., "woman," "F.," and "female." The variety of gender terms has been standardized on the Advanced Search to "female" and "male."

INFORMANT AGE
The field "Informant Age" contains the standardized terms "infant," "child," "teenager," "adult," and "senior." If the card text referred to age it might have said, for instance, "adult" or "50s" or "middle aged." The five age categories in the Advanced Search are an attempt to standardize terms to maximize the number of records returned on a search.

INFORMANT ETHNICITY
In the "Informant Ethnicity" field you can search such designations as "Asian," "Guatemalan," "Latino," "Welsh," and so on. You might also add "American" and search for "African American," "German American," "Mexican American," etc. Be aware, however, that many records do not contain information about informant ethnicity, for it was lacking in the original sources or it was not included in the data on the archive's cards.

PLACE COLLECTED
Sometimes an archive card or the source from which the text was derived cited a particular city, state, or region, or both a region and a state or city. Type the name of a city or state in the "Place Collected" field; for instance, "New Orleans," "Cleveland," "Los Angeles," "Pennsylvania," "North Carolina," "Florida," etc.

REGION OF COLLECTION
In some instances, the geographical area in which a belief was collected was identified as a broad region in the U.S. rather than a particular city or state. There are 15 choices regarding the "Region of Collection." To find out which states are included in a region, press the link "See Map". Most of the material in the archive was collected in the United States, but some was recorded elsewhere; hence the "Non U.S." category.

DATE COLLECTED
For the "Date Collected," the 20th and early 21st centuries have been divided into decades. Earlier material may be searched with "before 1900."

PLACE OF ORIGIN
For the "Place of Origin," type the name of a city, state, or foreign country. According to data on some of the cards in the archive, a belief or practice might have been collected in, say, California but the informant learned it while growing up in, for instance, Pennsylvania. Or the card text indicated another country of origin for a belief documented in the U.S.

REGION OF ORIGIN
For the "Region of Origin," follow the same procedure as "Region of Collection," checking the map if necessary. The difference between the two fields is that while a belief was collected in one region, the informant might have learned it in another region of the U.S. or in another country; or regardless of where it was collected or learned, the publication from which the data was taken might indicate that the belief originates in a particular geographical area.

CITATION
The "Citation" field concerns the published source of the belief or practice. Type an author's name, words in the title of a book or essay, or both. This field also refers to unpublished materials that are in the UCLA Archive of American Folk Medicine (abbreviated as "UCLA Folklore Archives").

A list of all the published sources of data in the archive is available on the Citations page. For other works on folk medicine, particularly more recent ones, see the bibliographies in Healing Logics: Culture and Medicine in Modern Health Belief Systems, edited by Erika Brady (Utah State University, Logan, 2001), pp. 211-277; and Herbal and Magical Medicine: Traditional Healing Today, edited by J. Kirkland, H. F. Mathews, C. W. Sullivan III, and K. Baldwin (Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., 1992), pp. 197-233.