Prayers, donkeys and holy wells: how obscure illnesses used to be dealt with

Researchers from Brunel University London have analysed a unique archive of 3,655 folk "cures" collected in the 1930s to test a long-standing anthropological hypothesis: people are more likely to turn to religious and supernatural remedies when the cause of illness is unclear. The results are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

How a unique archive of folk cures came to be

In the 1930s, a large-scale folklore project was launched in Ireland: about 50,000 schoolchildren were asked to ask their parents, grandparents and neighbours about local history, beliefs and cures. Teachers transcribed the stories into notebooks, eventually forming one of the most detailed archives of oral folk medicine.

"It's a real treasure trove," says study leader, psychologist Michal de Barra of Brunel University's Centre for Culture and Evolution. - "Children are writing down the stories of older generations, notebooks are going back to schools, and recently it's all been digitised.

The more mysterious the disease, the more "magic" is involved

To identify patterns, the researchers focused on 35 diseases and asked two doctors to rate how understandable they would have been to the average person at the time:

• obvious problems like cuts and sprains were classed as "understandable";

• diseases like tuberculosis, warts or epilepsy to the more mysterious.

Next, the team compared which diseases were most often "treated" with prayers, rituals or magic.

"We found that illnesses with unclear causes were about 50 per cent more likely to be accompanied by religious or magical prescriptions," notes co-author of the paper, psychologist Ayana Willard. - "However, neither pain, severity of illness, nor complexity of care were related to the amount of 'supernatural' in the treatment."

Unusual rituals were particularly common with infectious diseases - such as mumps, whooping cough, skin rust (erysipelas), and scrofulosis (enlarged lymph nodes in the neck, often associated with tuberculosis). Such ailments had no obvious cause and no clear way to intervene - and this, according to researchers, encouraged people to seek a solution in prayer and rituals.

From holy stones to the "power of the seventh son"

A range of practices are found in the recipes collected:

• religious - prayers over bleeding wounds, visits to holy wells and stones;

• magical - for example, the advice to pass a sick child under a donkey three times and give it bread on which the animal had "breathed".

Another recipe promised that the seventh son in a family could heal if he was put a worm in his hand as an infant and held until he died.

"These were not random traditions," de Barra emphasises. - They reflected the human desire to somehow understand and control one's health in situations where real answers simply weren't available."

Why it's still important today

The authors link their findings to classic work in anthropology, which shows that rituals are particularly active where there is a lot of uncertainty - whether it's dangerous fishing or risky travelling. In the case of disease, the researchers say, faith and rituals filled an explanatory vacuum.

And although they are talking about prescriptions nearly a century old, the findings are still relevant today, according to the scientists.

"It's very unsatisfactory to simply be left without a solution," de Barra notes. - "If official medicine doesn't provide an understandable answer or effective treatment, people are likely to keep looking for something that at least psychologically 'makes sense' to them."

The team's next step is to study how such beliefs spread across regions based on the original school records: where individual "cures" originated, how they spread, where they took hold, and where they disappeared.

"It's an incredibly rich resource, and it hasn't even been fully explored yet," summarises de Barra.