Healing Threads: Traditional Medicines of the highlands and islands

Healing Threads: Traditional Medicines of the Highlands and Islands. By Mary Beith. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1995. 15.00. ISBN 0 7486 6199 9

It is a pleasure to share the fruits of ten years of painstaking research in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Mary Beith traces in a fascinating and very readable way the background history from prehistoric times through to the present century. For the English reader, the book is of particular value because it gives an insight into the social history of this part of Scotland. The author's sources are rich and varied and include many written originally in Gaelic which are therefore unavailable to most English researchers.

Starting in the era of prehistory, Beith shows how the various sources of knowledge, empirical folk practice, monastic and other learning, and eventually printed sources, have blended together over the centuries to produce a rich tradition of healing.

The role of the healer appears to have...