Archive of Traditional Medicine

This Archive of Traditional Medicine constitutes over 375,000 entries, collected from both private and public folklore archives, some of which date back centuries. In 2012, the UCLA Library passed the data to Dr. David Delgado Shorter who worked for thirteen years on the data curation and management, under the public name of The Archive of Healing (TM). With students, programmers, and data management specialists, they developed levels of access and coded the data according to either modality type or user type. This Dataverse, collection reflects the database as of Winter 2025, including those access setting that were in place on the Archive of Healing (TM). For purposes of distinction, the data returned to UCLA in this Dataverse form will henceforth be renamed the Archive of Traditional Medicine, since the Archive of Healing (TM) will continue moving forward in a slightly altered trajectory. Please note that The AH team made some progress without fully vetting the archive’s content for quality, and so reminds its users that the content in most cases reflects the age cultural context of its origin. The archive is, in part, a historical roadmap of healing modalities and may not reflect today’s knowledge on particular subjects. The archive invites critical discussion on how healing knowledge differs across communities and cultures. You may find some of the data on the site to be objectionable, misleading, or erroneous. This archive draws from an array of content gathered from a wide variety of source materials, with language reflecting the unique—and often time-specific—cultural contexts from which the data was collected. Conserving the verbatim language of this historic data helps us observe the relationship between linguistics and medical literature which, like all institutional knowledge, is rife with flaws. In light of the fact that the Archive of Traditional Medicine serves as a scholarly database and not a medical platform, no aspect of this site offers clinically verified professional advice for immediate health concerns or chronic ailments. Should you seek peer-reviewed advice for a health concern, please seek professional counseling from a licensed healer rather than rely on the information within this database.