ABSTRACT
The text translated in the pages that follow is, on the face of it, that of a handwritten personal notebook belonging to a Cretan healer, and dating from early in the twentieth century. 1 But it is much more; it is filled with the medical lore of centuries of oral tradition, empirical experimentation and snippets of knowledge rooted in Byzantine and ultimately Graeco-Roman medical texts. The notebook is in every way a hotchpotch: vernacular and ecclesiastical Greek and Cretan dialect mix with words imported from Turkish and Italian. It offers cures for everything from headache to baldness to leprosy to gonorrhoea, advice on assessing rhubarb and appreciating ‘the joys of rosemary’, instructions for extracting oil from a turtle and for concocting phenomenal vinegar. There are magical rituals for epilepsy or for siring a male child and spells for use in a court case or to ward off the female demon who strikes infants with sudden death. Its enormous variety will certainly intrigue and enlighten, for it paints a vivid picture of the kinds of medicine available to the bulk of the Greek population over many centuries. And for those scholars whose interests lie in sleuthing among the ruins of ancient medical traditions, it offers glimpses of a long, convoluted and shadowy trail.
