| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Anthony Cavender. Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. xviii, 266. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.
A prominent theme of scholarship in Appalachian Studies over the past twenty-five years has been to argue that while Appalachian culture has many strong elements that link it to the region's past in ways that have perhaps disappeared from much of the rest of America, that culture itself is not a unique way of life that is completely unknown in other places. Scholars who write about Appalachia have been finding increasing amounts of evidence to disprove the well-known adage that Appalachia is "in but not of America." In Anthony Cavender's new book on southern Appalachian folk medicine, he puts himself squarely in the middle of this current interpretation of the mountain South's culture when he writes in his preface that "Southern Appalachian folk medicine is best understood within the context of Euro-American folk medicine." In fact, he asserts that "there never was nor is there now a variety of folk medicine unique to Southern Appalachia" (p. xiii).	1
Throughout the study, Cavender provides ample evidence of the place that folk medicine has played in the lives of Appalachian people of every social stratum. While the author provides examples of folk medical beliefs and practices in southern Appalachia that have persisted from the late eighteenth century to the present, he is most concerned with exploring and explaining the many ways that folk medical beliefs in Appalachia changed and evolved over time and "mirrored the changing health care environment of America" (p. xiv). Because of this interaction with events and developments in health care in and outside the mountains, Cavender can argue, like most other contemporary Appalachian scholars, that in the field of folk medicine and the healing arts, "Southern Appalachia was not shut off from the rest of America at all; to the contrary it was very much part of it" (p. xiv).	. . .

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