Erreurs Populaires
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The two-volume Erreurs Populaires (1578) is a work by Laurent Joubert.
Joubert was a significant figure in a movement that sought to challenge medical superstitions and ignorance in France. In his Erreurs Populaires he made clear, for example, that it was untrue that male children were born at full moon and female children at new moon. On the other hand, he erroneously suggested that a male child could be conceived at certain times of night or the month. Joubert's stated aim was to raise physicians and surgeons from their "routine illiterate practice" and to inform the people how better to look after themselves. In this endeavour, he made use of the growing influence of the press, contributing to the transfer from an oral to a printed tradition in medical knowledge.
Joubert and his colleagues met with opposition from those who, regarding the classical Greek and Latin medical texts as sacrosanct, were suspicious of medical advice written in French. Joubert argued that those who sought to deny people the knowledge to maintain their own health were no better than those who denied them the right to read religious texts in their own language. In effect, he was challenging closely guarded monopolies on medical knowledge, though he insisted that patients would be more likely to follow doctors' orders if they could understand them.
In Erreurs Populaires, Joubert addressed a series of popular errors in turn, which he documented and then discussed by reference to his own experience and practice. Of one local custom, he wrote: "Is it a good idea to sit a woman in labour on a hot couldron, or to put her husband's hat on her stomach, as do the good women of the villages around Montpellier? The hat probably will not help much, except perhaps to serve as a compress and help expulsion".
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