"That mountain is like a drug store": Knowledge and Medicine in Southern Appalachia, 1900-1933

Abstract

This thesis argues that although historians treat the relationship between professional medicine and folk medicine in Southern Appalachia as a competition and place Appalachian folk medicine as a victim of professionalization, the two forms of medicine are best understood as systems of knowledge. Through interviews, medical journals and administrative records, medical school records, and other archival sources, I trace how gender, race, and class shaped knowledge in Appalachian folk medicine and professional medicine during Prohibition and the early twentieth century. Despite the characterization of folk medicine as a victim to professionalization, I find that people in Southern Appalachia actively understood and engaged with shifting ideas of health and constant concerns over the high costs of medicine and limited accessibility to doctors throughout the twentieth century.