Mountain Healer "Tried for It," Succeeded
In her 1902 article "Incantations and Popular Healing in Maryland and Pennsylvania," Baltimore writer Letitia Humphreys Wrenshall profiles a "most accomplished weaver of quilt pieces and spells" whom she repeatedly visited and interviewed in Western Maryland. Today, we might call her unnamed interviewee a "wise woman," a "traditional healer" or "folk doctor." Wrenshall neither names nor precisely locates this healer, but neighbors might well have recognized her, in the unlikely event they had perused The Journal of American Folk-Lore : She was a gentle, quiet-spoken woman, living in her own thick-walled stone house, very comfortably surrounded, and supplied by all that was yielded from a well-cared-for place of several acres. (268-269) Moreover, the woman "was pretty, rosy, and plump," and had been raised by an aunt "who had married a 'German man'" (270-271). It was this man who taught his not-quite-niece all...