Vallejo and González Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 2014, 10:37 http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/10/1/37 JOURNAL OF ETHNOBIOLOGY AND ETHNOMEDICINE REVIEW Open Access Fish-based remedies in Spanish ethnomedicine: a review from a historical perspective José Ramón Vallejo1* and José Antonio González2 Abstract Background: Fish-based therapeutics is fundamentally based on a dietary use, but these vertebrates have also been employed in the treatment of infectious and parasitic diseases, during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum and to deal with diseases of the different systems. Methods: An overview of the ethnomedical and historical Spanish literature has been carried out. Automated searches in the most important national and international databases have been performed. All related works have been thorough examined. Results: We examine the historical use of 54 medicinal fish species, 48 marine and six from inland waters. As useful, in Ancient times 39 species have been recorded (of which only 21 have been collected in subsequent periods), seven in the Middle Ages, 18 in Modern times and 17 in the contemporary period. Anguilla anguilla, Engraulis encrasicolus or Scyliorhinus canicula are species that have survived over time as an ingredient in Spanish folk remedies. Most remedies used in the last century and currently are empirical remedies based on the humorism theory and the principle of contraria contrariis curantur (74%), and the rest (26%) are magical type remedies that complete the popular therapeutic arsenal. Conclusions: In the last century we find a progressive decrease in the number of fish species used in ethnomedicine. Only seven taxa have been documented as surviving therapeutic resources since centuries ago. The existence of a dynamic Spanish ethnomedicine has also been detected which has managed to generate new therapeutic resources in recent times. It is important to validate the remedies by ethnopharmacology and evidence-based medicine. In order to recover as much data as possible, it will be necessary to draw up an inventory of ethnoichthyological uses. Keywords: Ethnozoology, Ethnomedicine, Fish, Medical history, Medical anthropology, Spain Background animal-derived products to treat illnesses and health Ethnozoology is an emerging field in many areas of the conditions [13,14]. world and it is divided, due to its multidisciplinary cha- These works on zootherapy are a very useful tool in racter [1], into branches of knowledge such as ethnoen- the exploration of pharmacologically active substances tomology, ethnoherpetology or ethnoornithology [2-4]. [15,16]. But also there are other reasons of an anthro- Fishes have a long history of interaction with humans, pological kind for carrying out these ethnozoological thus “ethnoichthyology” is acquiring an important role studies. For example, they can help us in the under- in ethnozoological research [5-7]. There are some stu- standing of the human behavior toward health care and dies that discuss the role of ichthyofauna in traditional the use-consumption of fish resources. As well, in many medicines, mainly in fishing communities [8-12], and developing countries these studies have a great value in that reveal a large number of fish species used in zoo- fish diversity conservation [17-19]. therapy, understood as the medicinal use of animals and In Spain there has not been any ethnozoology devel- opment and only very few articles have been published * Correspondence: [email protected] with an ethnobiological approach, although some an- 1Departamento de Terapéutica Médico-Quirúrgica, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Extremadura, E-06006 Badajoz, Spain thropological, folk and ethnomedicinal studies have Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © 2014 Vallejo and González; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Vallejo and González Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 2014, 10:37 Page 2 of 31 http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/10/1/37 focused on the connections between human society and vernacular nomenclature contained in the works animals [20-23]. This has affected the study of the inter- consulted. This was all corroborated with catalogues actions between humans and fish (ethnoichthyology), of names, single-access or dichotomous keys of fish and the zootherapy based on these vertebrates is a field [79-82], and ichthyological databases and species identi- of research that has not been given due attention and fication websites [83-87]. The assessments have been must therefore be constructed from a framework of an made from Spanish species, although in some cases taxa “historical ethnozoology”. Following this philosophy, from other jurisdictional waters or maritime territories this paper illustrates the use of fishes in Spanish ethno- have been considered. Those valid scientific names medicine and its historical development as a therapeutic included in the Species 2000 and ITIS Catalogue of Life: resource. It provides an inventory of the species that 2013 Annual Checklist [88], are considered in the list of have been used for medicinal purposes from ancient species. The species of most historic importance have times to the present, and analyses the medical use of been established according to their inclusion in the fishes in the 20th century. remedies belonging to the 20th century and at least one Thus, our main objective is to obtain an inventory of previous era. the fish species that have been used in Spain for thera- The illnesses treated with the species mentioned are peutic purposes from antiquity to the present. From this classified using the chapters of the International Statis- we determine which medicinal species have survived to tical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Prob- recent times and what diseases or medical conditions lems 10th Revision, ICD-10 (Version: 2010) [89]. Taking they have been used for. into account the species employed in the past century, the relative importance of each group of diseases (ICi) Methods in Spanish ethnomedicine has been calculated. A calcu- Procedures lation has been made of the relationship between the The present study forms part of a project revision of the number of useful species registered for each chapter ethnozoology in Spain, for which various databases have (Ci) and the number obtained for the chapter with been examined: ISI Web of Science and Anthropology greatest species richness (Cmax); i.e. ICi =Ci/Cmax. Plus, JSTOR III - Arts and Sciences, TESEO, the infor- mation system of the databases of the Consejo Superior Data analysis de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the bibliographic The Spanish ethnomedicine applies to medical ideas website Dialnet, Google Scholar, and the catalogue of and practices with magical, religious and natural (em- Public State Libraries (BPE). The search focused on the pirical) background [43,45,49,64,71]. In this regard, we type of documents contained in folklore, ethnographic, have classified all the documented remedies despite history of medicine and social and medical anthropology difficulties in establishing boundaries for this kind of studies. The key words used were: anthropology, history work review method since remedies based on empirical of medicine, ethnomedicine, folk medicine, folklore, knowledge are found as well as magical-religious the- zoology, ethnozoology and ethnoichthyology, and the rapies with both empirical and esoteric bases. In accord- names of the different fish groups in Spanish or English, ance with the previously mentioned, the categories for as appropriate. The search framework also made use of type of remedy are as follows: “magical remedies” and a list of zoonyms contained in Spanish dictionaries [24], “empirical remedies” (i.e., natural medicine home re- and a directory with the names of the most relevant medies for those using fish parts for therapeutic means authors of therapeutics throughout history. starting from an empirical base). The search results were catalogued and the infor- On the other hand, to evaluate the route of admi- mation was classified into ichthyologic groups and his- nistration of the remedies, we consider two categories: torical periods, according to the classical periodization “internal use” and “external use”. followed by Christoph Cellarius (1638–1707) and those All these are categories make up the variables studied recently employed by De Vos [25]. A total of 52 docu- in a test of independence once the values obtained ments have been analyzed [26-78], of which appro- in two-by-two contingency tables were included. The ximately 8% belong to Ancient history, 10% to Medieval, Pearson’s chi-squared test (χ2) was used to answer the 10% to “Modern” (6% to 15th-17th centuries and 4% question of no association between variables. This test to 18th-19th centuries, respectively), and 72% to “con- rejects the null hypothesis (of independence) for statis- temporary history”, i.e. from beginning 20th century to tic values too big to be attributed to random chance. All present (Table 1). of this allows us to answer the following