ABSTRACT
Pioneering early eighteenth-century histories of medicine by Daniel Le Clerc and John Freind regarded their new subject as a history of the doctrines of the great doctors from Hippocrates onwards. When they came across anything in their physician authors that smacked of magic or charms they were scornful and dismissive, referring to “superstitious receipts”. The eclipse of humoral theories and the emergence of laboratory-based medicine at the end of the eighteenth century only served to reinforce this negative attitude amongst historians of medicine. But history itself changed as a discipline. With a new value attached, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, to examining the manuscript records of medieval medicine by German scholars like Julius Pagel and Karl Sudhoff, and French scholars like Charles Daremberg, magical healing began to seem a subject worthy of serious study. From another direction, national movements to collect and study folk traditions (in time to become the discipline of “Folkloristik”) were beginning to build national corpora of charms and rituals whose development was understood as a continuous process from an era before the beginning of written records. The publications resulting from this scholarly mining of original sources for medicine and magic were impressive in their size and scope, and modern historical scholarship has still only partially digested these findings. 1
