Kapronczay Károly szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 186-187. (Budapest, 2004)
KÖZLEMÉNYEK — COMMUNICATIONS - KOTOK, Alexander: Homeopathy in Bulgaria: from revolutionaries to professionals. - Homeopátia Bulgáriában: a forradalmároktól a szakemberekig
graduates of various French universities, whilst some one third was represented by the graduates of the Russian medical faculties, that is to say every third native Bulgarian doctor was educated in the spirit of disliking, speaking softly, homeopathy. Bulgarian medical journals often reprinted papers from Russian medical periodicals in Bulgarian ones even without translation, as firstly, Russian and Bulgarian languages are very similar and almost completely understandable even for those Bulgarians who never studied Russian, and secondly many readers of Bulgarian medical journals were graduates of the Russian universities. Several issues later Meditsiniski nepredek came back to Dr. Manoilov's story. It was reported that the City Sanitary Department ordered to check the clinic of Dr. Manoilov and sent there its inspection, which found no less than a whole homeopathic pharmacy with the well-appointed laboratory. 7 It seems that this inspecting and its apparent conclusions did not lead to any serious consequences for Dr. Manoilov, as the journal, although promising to get back to the subject, never did it. Instead two issues later the untiring editor published his own large anti-homeopathic paper which was concluded in the following way: "As a virgin country which from the very beginning of its freedom has adopted its own health system being in accordance to the modern advances of science, the state has not to defend this misleading leaching, compromising medicine as a whole. I suppose that everyone understands that our medical authorities should allow neither homeopathic treatment nor opening homeopathic pharmacies as nowhere homeopathy is recognized officially, no medical faculty teaches it. Thus, there is absolutely no reason to increase the number of those coming to exploit the credulity of Bulgarians " 8 . To the great disappointment of the allopaths from Meditsinski napredek, nothing came from those passionate appeals. At first Dr. Manoilov had freely joined the Sofia Association of Physicians, the next year he was already elected to take the post of the Secretary of the Association. This fact provoked a new outbreak of anger of the editor Mollov. "How homeopath can be elected to fill any post in a scientific society? Homeopathy has nothing to do with science! The Sofia physicians simply demonstrated their real attitude both to science and to their own association!" 9 . In the next year, 1902, the issuing of the journal was ceased without any explanation. No surprise was in it. Most of Bulgarian pre-WWI medical journals were short-lived. Yet it is possible that these incidents of intolerance and bias were characteristic to some extent only for the early period of Bulgarian medicine, when an aggressive minority of allopathic doctors tried to foist upon the whole medical society in Bulgaria its own conceptions of how Bulgarian medicine should look like. As to the majority, most Bulgarian doctors did not take much interest of what should have been considered scientific and what not, even more so that homeopathy had never represented any serious threat to the income of allopathic physicians. As we saw, a homeopathic doctor was even elected to be the Secretary of a society. One can suppose that though many Bulgarian doctors were probably infected from their Russian teachers with the bias toward homeopathy, they did not transfer their own opinions on personal relationships with colleagues. Tracing 7 Meditsinski napredek. May 1900, 5, p. 338. 8 Mollov D. Za homeopatiiata (On homeopathy) Meditsinski napredek. September 1900, 9, p. 593. 9 Meditsinski napredek. May 1900, 3, p. 141.
