ABSTRACT
In a society prone to quantify and measure things, it is no surprise that we would defer to body sciences, of which the most prominent is medicine. Medical science improves on folk wisdom passed along orally, which helped people address their health problems for over a thousand years before the Enlightenment. Folk wisdom can be helpful, such as your grandmother’s recipe for chicken soup, to be imbibed when you catch a cold. But it has its limitations. It won’t necessarily help you deal e ectively with high blood pressure or the need for a hip replacement. One might respond that most people in agricultural societies did not experience high blood pressure because they got exercise in their daily lives, weren’t obese, and did not have diets high in re ned sugar. Rural poverty had an upside, as long as one could eke out enough calories to survive.
