author
Fletcher Gardner
1869–1952
A physician turned field researcher, this writer gathered folk tales, languages, and scripts from the Philippines at a time when many of them were rarely recorded in print. His books bridge medicine, anthropology, and folklore in a way that still feels unusual today.
1 Audiobook
Philippine Folk-Tales
by Clara Kern Bayliss, Laura Estelle Watson Benedict, Fletcher Gardner, Berton L. (Berton Lewis) Maxfield, W. H. Millington
About the author
Born in 1869, Fletcher Gardner was an American doctor who earned his M.D. from the University of Michigan in 1891. Early in his career he also wrote on public health, including Practical Sanitation (1914), showing the medical side of work that would later expand in a very different direction.
Gardner's long-lasting interest in the Philippines grew from his service there as a contract surgeon on Mindoro from 1902 to 1906. That experience led him to collect and translate local stories and traditions, including Mindoro Folk Tales and contributions to Philippine Folk-Tales. Later, he continued studying Philippine languages and writing systems, editing and publishing works such as Indic Writings of the Mindoro-Palawan Axis and Philippine Indic Studies.
He died in 1952. What makes his work memorable is the range of it: he was not only a physician, but also a recorder of oral tradition and a researcher of scripts and language, preserving materials that might otherwise have been much harder to trace.