Online Archive of Folk Remedies

UCLA has established an online archive of over 200,000 folk remedies at http://www.folkmed.ucla.edu . It's searchable by simple keyword, with a switch allowing you to specify whether you want to do AND or OR searches. You can view between 5 and "all" records at a time -- the default is 10.

I did a search for headache and got over 1800 results! Results are presented in a table, with the complaint on one side (in the case of what I was looking at the complaints were "Headaches" or "headaches, head ailments") and on the other side the remedies (a couple of the remedies on the first page of results: "applied - handful of salt on top of head" and "performed - wrap head with paper soaked in vinegar")

I thought by clicking on the name of the complaint I'd get a list of remedies for that particular complaint. Instead I got a list of details for one particular remedy. Information on the remedy includes the region where it was collected, the gender of the informant, the date and place where it was collected, and the citation where the remedy was found. Not all information is available for all remedies.

Of course, it should be noted that these are folk remedies and visitors would do well to take a gander at the site's disclaimer (http://www.folkmed.ucla.edu/disclaimer.html.)

Posted to Science-Medicine | TrackBack