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rituals offered reassurance in times of uncertainty and exceptional need. 3 Reliance on popular belief and folk practice by midwives in the birth room, coupled with the intimacy of the exclusively female rituals that took place during confinement and lying-in, could expose the midwife to charges of using magic or the supernatural. She could become the target of suspicion of witchcraft. 4 Since the turn of the century, however, scholarship has illustrated how misleading and unbalanced this perception is. 5 Nonetheless
their lower orders, the belly was viewed as ‘a subtle but fragile alembic’ requiring safeguarding by supernatural powers. In their murky proximity, the womb, the bowels and the belly were linked by their cloacal properties. The curative powers of these saints were intimately tied to their inner organs, and their representations insist on the materiality of the body as well as their symbolic significance: thus these saints proffer and extend their bowels in their own hands and were worshipped by 13 Bellies, bowels and entrails in the eighteenth century believers who
as existing in a rational universe, eighteenth-century medicine began to see madness as something other than caused by the supernatural. Still, the mad were often equated with brute animals and treated as such. To restore sanity, physicians devised ‘heroic’ methods to create dramatic bodily changes – such as MAD0181_ERNST_v1.indd 56 08/10/2015 09:18 American therapeutic work and mental illness57 gross changes in blood circulation – the most famous being Benjamin Rush’s device to increase blood flow by whirling the patient and another to bind the patient’s head
leper at the end of this episode in the Vita secunda . Having turned the ‘bitterness’ of the leper into the ‘sweetness’ of God with a kiss, Francis looked around, searching for the leper who was nowhere to be seen. This supernatural element is an addition by Thomas of Celano that was carried further in later vitae and stories of Saint Francis. The leper’s mysterious disappearance suggests that the he was a divine tool who was sent in order to facilitate Francis’s final moment of conversion. 60 In future versions (mostly those written by Spiritual authors) this
( 1 ), 27–41 . Bass , Thomas ( 1997 ) ‘ Traditional African psychotherapy: An interview with Thomas Adeoye Lambo ’, in Magic, Witchcraft and Religion: An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural, ed. A. C. Lehmann and J. E. Myers , pp. 165–170 . Paolo Alto : Mayfield Publishing Company . Brodwin , Paul and
some of the blood of the party sent unto him’. 14 That he did so without shame or qualm, Fludd reasoned, should be evidence enough for any rational mind that his powers owed nothing to improper forces. Taliacotian rhinoplasty became intimately entwined with medical sympathy from a very early date. Rumours that Tagliacozzi was dabbling in unwholesome, even supernatural medicines arose during his lifetime, creating an atmosphere ripe for superstition around his procedure. The sixteenth-century poet Elisio Calenzio provides the earliest known account that a graft
pretences’: types of delusion described in the New Jersey lunacy commissions in order of frequency (N = 98)* Type of delusion No. % Apocalyptic (personal and global) 15 15.3 About persecution 12 12.2 Of Grandeur 11 11.2 About imaginary foes 10 10.2 About other people's property 9 9.1 About the nature of objects 6 6.1 About God 4 4.1 About the devil 4 4.1 About witches/wizards/fairies/spirits 3 3.1 Having supernatural powers 3 3.1 About being ill 3 3.1 About infidelity 3
and the cure was never practised on a large scale. Despair about finding a cure led Europeans to try pills made from the flesh of a green lizard. A widespread belief among the Afro-Surinamese held that eating or even touching a lizard could cause leprosy, and this was partly supported by the belief in the existence of the treef, the supernatural taboo animal. Europeans considered that this belief system was superstitious, but for pragmatic reasons they were prepared to entertain the notion that there was some connection between leprosy and lizards. ‘Anything that
public health grounds. In opposition to this domination, there were forms of low-profile and undisclosed resistance in everyday 190 190 Leprosy and colonialism life, or what Scott calls ‘infrapolitics’. In Suriname, this resistance included a refusal to cooperate with examinations, and hidden transcripts of anger about treatment and disrespect (because of stigmatizing, or forced transports to Paramaribo). As the following chapters show, people held fast to their own folk beliefs about the supernatural influences in the aetiology of leprosy, despite the ideas of
.18 Yet Yu Fengbin differentiates his position from that of the physicians trained in Japan who sought to reform medicine completely on the Meiji model. In China, Yu argued, this antagonistic approach had thus far led to a polarization of medical politics, so that those promoting the new medicine could no longer speak to supporters of Chinese medicine. Its opponents argued that Chinese medicine was corrupt and must be abolished, while the latter, without investigating the new medicine, argued that their medicine was completely beneficial and even had supernatural