Timothy Walker’s Doctors, Folk Medicine and the Inquisition is a book about which I find myself strangely ambivalent. On one hand, it is a model of what careful archival research and attention to historical sources can produce. On the other hand, there is a certain carelessness with regard to issues about which an historian with Walker’s attention to detail should be more careful.
The book is a study of the ways in which médicos (medical doctors) worked with the Holy Office (Inquisition) in Portugal to suppress curandeiros/saludadares (popular healers). The médicos had a variety of motives, ranging from a desire to suppress commercial rivals, to sincere religious belief, to a desire to make medicine scientific.
Walker points out that the particular case in Portugal differs in many respects from common-place assumptions about witchcraft and its role in early modern Europe. Because there has been a tendency in English-language scholarship on witchcraft to focus on a few areas of Europe (primarily Scandinavia, Hungary, and the British Isles) without broader comparative data, scholars have drawn certain general conclusions that turn out to be false in Portugal. This volume thus fills a much needed gap in the literature.
The subtitle, "The Repression of Magical Healing in Portugal during the Enlightenment," accurately reflects the book’s emphasis on the repression by these doctors, and not on the folk healers themselves. Anyone seeking a work focused on the healers or on folk medicine will find the book lacking. Given the bias of Inquisition records,however, it is difficult to fault Walker in this regard: to do more than he has done would be necessarily to enter into the realm of speculation.
What Walker does very well is create a portrait of the inquisitors and doctors in eighteenth-century Portugal. His portrait is finely crafted in that tradition of historiography most closely aligned with folklore: microhistory. He does an excellent job at drawing together the personal histories of individuals involved in official medicine of the period. He focuses on the interplay between "Old Christian" and "New Christian" (i.e., Jews forced to convert to Christianity) doctors. New Christians constituted a large portion of Portuguese medical doctors in the eighteenth century, but they were perpetually suspected (often accurately) of being covert Jews. Many Old Christian doctors with close ties to the Inquisition actively used the institution to suppress New Christian professional rivals. One of the ironies of this situation was that the doctors working for the Inquisition had relatively unfettered access to banned medical texts seized from New Christians, so the Inquisition became instrumental in spreading the knowledge of new medical techniques.
Although the book is very strong as microhistory of doctors affiliated with the Inquisition, there are a number of problems that stood out to me. First, Walker does not define what he means by "magic," and he routinely uses "magical practitioners," "magical criminals," and "illicit healers" interchangeably to term the village healers. This latter is particularly problematic in that most of the individuals he examined operated quite openly in the village context. Because he does not define his terms, it is not clear whether "magic" refers to (1) the (uninterrogated) terms of the Inquisition, (2) some sort of self-identification on the part of the "illicit healers," or (3) some sort of neo-Frazerian notion of magic. I suspect the first option to be the case, but the third cannot be ruled out. If he does assume some sort of absolute definition of magic, it is a problematic one in that in many cases the cures of the médicos (e.g., bloodletting) actually look more "magical" today than do the application of herbs and poultices the curandeiros were liable to apply. Given that his bibliography includes works that specifically address the problems of "magic," the lack of a definition is a curious oversight and a nagging problem.
Second, I was struck by Walker’s apparent surprise that the Inquisition could line up on the side of Enlightenment medicine and thereby serve a socially progressive role, a point important enough to be made on the back cover and in press materials for the book. There is no reason, however, why present-day images of the Inquisition as a reactionary force should map neatly onto historical and social issues of that period. As the book presents an otherwise nuanced and sophisticated view of the Inquisition as a fundamentally human and political institution, this simplistic assessment of the Inquisition is surprising.
Third, the book presents most percentages with two decimal-point precision. For example, he states that "cunning men…outnumber[ed] cunning women thirteen to nine, or 59.09 percent compared to 40.91 percent." This level of precision would be meaningful only if his sample size were hundreds of times larger: none of his data support a precision of more than 1%. Were he writing for the sciences, Walker would be criticized for implying a non-existent precision. While this criticism may seem pedantic, it does point out the often careless ways in which those in the humanities emulate the forms of scientific discourse.
In the end, despite some problems, Doctors, Folk Medicine and the Inquisition serves as a valuable contribution to scholarly understanding of witchcraft and its persecution in Europe, complicating any simple assertions to universality based on data from other areas. The data it provides are intriguing and open to further analysis in a number of areas. Folklorists interested in witchcraft will certainly find the book useful, although at times maddening for its carelessness regarding issues we find central. Unfortunately, with a price tag of $199, it is unlikely to end up in the personal libraries of most folklorists interested in the topic, who will only be able to access it through institutional libraries.
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[Review length: 950 words • Review posted on February 8, 2007]