Why Donkeys, Snails and Other Folk Cures Made Sense: What 1930s Irish Remedies Reveal

Why Strange Folk Cures Persisted

Rubbing a black snail across a wart and then impaling it with a thorn was once believed to make the wart vanish. Feeding bread to a donkey — after the animal had first breathed on it — was reported as a cure for whooping cough. Laying one’s head against a pig was said to relieve mumps. Although these remedies sound odd today, they offer a valuable window into how people in the past tried to make sense of illness.

What the Study Analyzed

Researchers at Brunel University London examined a rare archive of 3,655 folk cures collected in Ireland during the 1930s. The material came from a large Irish Folklore Commission project in which roughly 50,000 primary schoolchildren were given notebooks and asked to interview parents, grandparents and neighbors about local customs, stories and remedies. Teachers transcribed the notebooks, and the collection — nearly three-quarters of a million pages — was recently digitized.

Methods and Key Findings

For the new analysis, the team focused on 35 diseases and asked two medical doctors to rate how understandable each condition would have seemed to a layperson in the 1930s: whether the cause and bodily processes were clear or mysterious. Conditions like cuts and sprains were judged as obvious, while tuberculosis, warts and epilepsy were labeled more mysterious.

The researchers found that diseases perceived as having uncertain causes were about 50% more likely to be associated with religious or magical treatments. Infectious conditions such as mumps, whooping cough and scrofula (a neck swelling often linked to tuberculosis) appeared particularly often alongside supernatural cures.

Examples of Remedies

The documented cures ranged from explicitly religious acts — prayers, visits to holy wells and the use of sacred stones — to more ritualized or symbolic procedures. Examples include passing a sick child under a donkey three times and then feeding the child bread that the donkey had breathed on, or believing a seventh son could heal ailments if a worm placed in his infant hand died there.

These weren’t random traditions. They reflected people’s need to understand and influence their health, especially when real answers weren’t available. — Dr. Mícheál de Barra

Why It Matters

The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, builds on earlier anthropology showing ritual and religious behaviors increase in situations of uncertainty, such as fishermen offering prayers before dangerous voyages. When medical causes are unclear or scientific treatments are unavailable, ritual and belief systems can provide psychological relief and a perceived way to act.

Next steps: The team plans to map the geographic distribution of these remedies using the original school records to trace how folk medicine spread, clustered or faded over time.