Antike Und Moderne Volksmedizin

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license This book explores the magical and medical history of executions from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century by looking at the afterlife potency of criminal corpses, the healing activities of the executioner, and the magic of the gallows site. The use of corpses in medicine and magic has been recorded back into antiquity. The lacerated bodies of Roman gladiators were used as a source of curative blood, for instance. In early modern Europe, a great trade opened up in ancient Egyptian mummies and the fat of executed criminals, plundered as medicinal cure-alls. However, this is the first book to consider the demand for the blood of the executed, the desire for human fat, the resort to the hanged man’s hand, and the trade in hanging rope in the modern era. It ends by look at the spiritual afterlife of dead criminals.

"Reprint, with minor correction, of the first edition first published 1980 by the Athlone Press, London, UK"-- t.p. verso.

This text takes a set of central topics from ancient Greek medicine and biology - relating especially to beliefs about animals, women and drugs - and studies first the interaction between scientific theorising and folklore, and second the ideological character of ancient scientific inquiry. Within this framework the author looks at the development of zoological taxonomy, the repercussions of prevailing Greek assumptions concerning the inferiority of the female sex on medical practice, pharmacology and anatomy. Anthropology is used to provide a comparative dimension to the discussion of ancent Greek popular beliefs.

First published in 1930, this volume aimed to provide an overview of folk-lore which contrasted with the Anthropological school. Consciously working in the legacy of Savigny and the Brothers Grimm, the author explored the unrecorded traditions found within popular fiction, custom, belief, magic and ritual, attempting a reconstruction of humanity’s spiritual history through popular rather than elite voices. The work was intended to prove useful to scholars of related fields to folk-lore, with hopes of eventual interdisciplinarity.

"Brief table of contents of vols. I-XX" in v. 21, p. [502]-618.