At the SASS conference last May in San Francisco Tom DuBois,
a folklorist and professor at the University of Wisconsin, presented an
engaging paper on his work with a grad student, Jonathan F. Lang. The two of
them had teamed up to investigate the science behind the medical healing
practices that Johan Turi described in his books An Account of the Sami
(1910) and Lappish Texts (1918–19). Although the practices often sound
arcane, DuBois rightly supposed that many of them must have been efficacious enough
to have been remembered. Lang researched these healing treatments, many of them
related to ethnobotany and animals, and DuBois supplied the context for Sami folk
healing in Northern Scandinavia a hundred years ago.
Their scientific paper, “Johan Turi’s animal, mineral, vegetable cures
and healing practices: an in-depth analysis of Sami (Saami) folk healing one
hundred years ago” is now available online from the Journal of
Ethnobotany and Ethnomedicine.
I recall when read An
Account of the Sami (in its earlier translation by E.Gee Nash, Turi’s Book of Lapland), that I was
struck by Turi’s references to treatments using frogs: “The frog is a creature that, if one dares
takes it in one’s hand and the frog happens to pee, that hand acquires healing
power. If one only presses an affected area with such a hand, the pain will
diminish at once. And the frog is also a remedy for when one has skin eruptions
around the mouth: one presses and rubs the frog on the affected area.”
Eeww.
But it turns out that the Sami were on to something. As Lang
found in his research and literature review:
“The ways in which Turi suggests to use frogs—i.e., either
to directly rub a live frog on the affected area or to ingest a frog dried and
cooked in milk—suggest the presence of bioactive compounds in frog skin. In the
1980’s it was discovered that frogs secrete antimicrobial peptides in their
skin. These peptides inhibit the growth of bacteria and fungi, and induce osmotic
lysis in protozoa.”
The article has many more fascinating links between science
and Sami folk healing.
No comments:
Post a Comment