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Healer’s Choice: Gender, Self-Care, and Women’s Wellness Products in an Appalachian Coal Town

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Abstract

Central Appalachia experienced profound transitions during industrialization as modern scientific medicine, led by male doctors, actively displaced midwives and other folk healers. Medical reforms targeted company-controlled coalmining towns, which offered the latest care and first aid, hygiene, and scientific house-holding instruction. Residents of Jenkins, Kentucky, enthusiastically availed themselves of professional medical services, but patent medicine use and folk care continued. Century-old stereotypes about isolation and provincialism portray mountaineers as “hillbillies” resistant to change and modernity; however, medicines from the Shop Hollow Dump (ca. 1911-30s trash dump) suggest women creatively took charge of their bodies by self-administering products that simultaneously referenced scientific medicine and women-led "folk" traditions. Women consumers created new space for the work of feminine healing, destabilizing the patriarchal medical establishment’s hegemony which had radically altered gendered relationships of care. Studies of medicine reveal the historical importance of women-led care, providing crucial antidotes to Appalachia’s perpetual representation as medically underserved, impoverished, and backwards.

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Source: The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 11 January 1925, New York

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Acknowledgments

Thank you first and foremost to the residents of Jenkins and McRoberts for sharing their stories, enthusiasm, and support during this project. Your stories made this project possible and relevant and the gift of your time and history humbles me. Special thanks to Nagatha Anderson, Donna Boggs, and Ked and Eileen Sanders. This research owes a debt of gratitude to my doctoral committee, including Kim McBride, Richard Jefferies, Dwight Billings, and George Crothers. Thank you to Kim McBride and William Updike for providing notes and recollections from the Phase III excavations 25 years ago. Thanks to Jay Stottman and Jeff Watts-Roy for developing the KYHistArch online historic artifact cataloguing system and for fielding many, many questions during my work. This research was partially funded by the Kentucky Oral History Commission.

The research leading to these results received funding from the Kentucky Oral History Commission under Grant 395, the University of Kentucky Department of Anthropology's Susan Abbot-Jamieson Pre-Dissertation Award, the University of Kentucky Appalachian Studies Program's James S. Brown Graduate Student Award, and a University of Kentucky Appalachian Center Research Assistantship.

The author has no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

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    Zada Komara

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Komara, Z. Healer’s Choice: Gender, Self-Care, and Women’s Wellness Products in an Appalachian Coal Town. Int J Histor Archaeol 27, 158–182 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-022-00651-w

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