This study is an investigation of the representations of traditional medicine in Revival-era literature, with a particular focus on the works of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Lady Augusta Gregory (1852–1932), and John Millington Synge (1871–1909). Folk medicine and cures, both image and metaphor, are central to the literature of what has become known as the Revival period in Ireland (c. 1889–1922). This is an element of these writers’ concerns with folk practices, and yet the Irish Literary Revival can be seen as a resuscitation of sorts: a cultural process that was framed in explicitly medical terms, which sought to breathe new life into the country’s past. As John Wilson Foster wrote, “Recovery of the legends was recovery of a heroic Ireland, and recovery not merely in the sense of unearthing but in the sense of vigorous convalescence, of enabling a rebirth” (Fictions 10). Traditional medicine was a distinctive area of Irish life and practice that could be woven into Irish prose, drama, and poetry as part of the project of bringing to light the country’s overlooked folk ways. The deployment of folk medicine, healers, and cures as an image, though, had a metaphorical significance that is inextricable from the wider political tensions at work in Ireland in the decades before the foundation of the Free State. Literature that represents traditional medicine at times gestures towards the possibility of a culture and nation in the act of healing itself from illness, and at times questions these nationalist discourses.