Fűrészné Molnár Anikó szerk.: Komárom – Esztergom Megyei Múzeumok Közleményei 3. (Tata, 1989)

Néprajz - Tisovszki Zsuzsanna: Népi orvoslás, növényismeret Esztergom-Szentgyörgymezőn

They used to relieve different pains the flowers of the nut, the nutshell, the leaves of the nut, the cover of the nut, onion and garlic, nettle brew, burdock, elder, juniper, black radish, sugar-beet and carrot. The popular cosmetics and hair dyers came from the above mentioned plants (just as camomile or nut leaf brew). Many popular traditions at Szentgyörgymező are linked to animal-healing. The most common animal diseases were indigestion, inflation and colic that they tried to cure with the brew of different kind of plants or with "surgical interventions". The drugs used to cure animals (plants and foods) were mostly the same they used to cure human illnesses. The irrational cures; the bewitching, the prevention of the bewitching were as important parts of the popular healing as those based on natural substances and in many healing practices the natural methods and those based on belief were in close connection. Those suffering of bewitching were mostly little children and animals. The reason is obvious: little children and animals cannot relate the symptoms, cannot tell what they feel what hurts them, so for their entourage it is very often an unsolvable secret. Most of the cases related are about bewitched children. The suffering child is feverish, is crying and his appetite is lost. In such cases he is washed with coaly water or with the brew of "God's grass". For physical weakness and for releaving the pain they sometimes used holy water or holy pussywillow. They regarded supernatural force to smoke and to smoke-cure. (They used to cure with it bewitching and tooth-ache.) The holy things protected the animals, too from bewitching. (Holy water, Christmas morsel sacred Easter meals, etc.). In the case of the most common animal diseases they believed in the joint efect of both natural and magic procedures. (Salted pickle and a hat kept under the Christmas table for treating the hove animals.) Finally we can conclude that the procedures based on belief mostly disappeared from the popular healing experience. They only survive in the remembrence of the older generation. As to the medicinal herbs and the natural substances not only interest of the specialists have increased in the past decades but a large number of the population believes in them, too. The etnomedicinal research is not carried on mostly by etnographers but numerous doctors are interested in it, too. 52