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Paper short abstract:

Modernization affected how healing authorities were narrated. Belief narratives about vernacular healers adapted concepts of medicine in resisting theory-based healing that was promoted by the newspaper narratives. This paper examines the use of narratives as strategies in medicine and healing.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the discourses on Swedish-language vernacular magical healing in Ostrobothnia, Finland, at the turn of the 20th century. In the same medical market, both vernacular healers and physicians attracted patients with different healing schemas. Whereas traditional healers based their healing on traditional knowledge of where the illnesses came from and how they could be healed, physicians who were just arriving to the local medical market based their knowledge on theory-based medicine. In the local vernacular narratives about famous healers they were associated with sin and were gossiped of making a deal with the Devil. Nevertheless, the vernacular narratives portray these healers as more efficient in healing than physicians. Newspapers of the time, however, promoted narratives of healing that described these “quacks” as less efficient than academically-trained physicians or even lethal with their healing.

These diverse narratives of healing and medicine represent a breaking point in the local history when traditional healing methods and authorities were giving room in the medical market for emerging theory-based healing brought by the modernization process. Narratives about magical healers aiding the physicians communicate resistance towards previously unknown kind of healing whereas newspapers articles, communicating elite discussion on healing, narrated a restrictive voice on medical authority. This papers surveys these conflicting, yet intertextual and genre-breaking narratives, with discourse analysis. It offers a new insight on vernacular healing models of the rural Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnia as well as an unique case study of narrated medical market that is going through a fundamental change.