African American Folk Healing

University professor Stephanie Y. Mitchem’s African American Folk Healing is “an exploration of the history and practices of black healers and healing.”

Cure a nosebleed by holding a silver quarter on the back of the neck. Treat an earache with sweet oil drops. Wear plant roots to keep from catching colds. Within many African American families, these kinds of practices continue today, woven into the fabric of black culture, often communicated through women. Such folk practices shape the concepts about healing that are diffused throughout African American communities and are expressed in myriad ways, from faith healing to making a mojo.

Stephanie Y. Mitchem reveals a variety of folk practices and traces their development from the time of slavery through the Great Migrations, exploring how they have continued into the present and their relationship with alternative medicines. Through conversations with black Americans, she demonstrates how herbs, charms, and rituals continue folk healing performances. These are more than healing practices; they are linked to expressions of faith, delineating aspects of a holistic epistemology and pointing to disjunctures between African American views of wellness and illness and those of the culture of institutional medicine.

“Draws deeply and thoughtfully from the experiences and words of its subjects, offering alternative visions of human creativity, resistance, and community.” —Yvonne Chireau, author of Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition

"An insightful work that places folk healing within the context of larger spiritual, political, and intellectual movements. It illuminates the interconnectedness among activism, medicine, gender studies, folklore, and theology that influence the ways African American female healers work and live." ―The Journal of African American History