Traditional Iberian folk medicine in dermatology.

The consideration of folk medicine places us in a hazy domain where meanings are clouded by interests and assumptions which are often at odds with one another. This article on folk medicine in the Iberian Peninsula reveals that while there is no doubt of the vitality of the practice and the relevance of the concept, its content and function depend on the context in which it is used. Folk medicine is at once a body of practice and study. Those who practice and benefit from it in Spain also call it household or domestic medicine. In the past it gave rise to a number of written treatises which were highly diffused among popular sectors, whence its common designation medicina de pobres (of the poor) or medicina vulgar. Folk medicine today continues to be defined in contradistinction to an official system of medical knowledge, as a form which draws on both empirical principles of this official system and on magic and religious knowledge. Those who have approached folk medicine as an object of study did so, at first, with a view toward collecting data on popular practices and beliefs about health and illness (folk medicine), emphasizing the cultural values which shape these (ethnomedicine); later and more recently their investigations have also served to legitimize folk medicine as a distinct branch of medical anthropology. The purpose of this article is to review and summarize the status of research on folk medicine in the Iberian Peninsula. In the first part we suggest some key features of the relationship between folk and academic medicine and trace the history of the study of Iberian folk medicine. In the second section, we focus on skin, a subject of paramount interest and indeed specialization within Iberian folk medicine, and provide a summary of some of the most relevant and representative investigations of this subject for various regions of Spain and Portugal.