A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Studia Ethnographica 6. (Szeged, 2008)

Grynaeus Tamás: Makó és környéke hagyományos orvoslása II

Traditional healing in Makó and surroundings II. by TAMÁS GRYNAEUS The second part of the paper starts with the dermatological concepts of ethnomedicine in Makó and its vicinity: etiology, prevention and therapy. The extent of the chapter indicates the richness of knowledge gained in the field. The next chapter focusing on internal diseases enhances the earlier opinion that here we cannot presume on clearly identifiable diseases of internal medicine in the modern sense of the word, they identify and treat a disease upon some leading symptoms (e.g. shivering fits, cholaemia, cough etc.). That is why we cannot classify ethnomedical diseases upon the official, academic disease entities. In both chapters mentioned above, the great number and variety of folk remedies, incantations and faith-healing is remarkable. The great number shows that these diseases were/could be quite frequent and caused serious problems to people in their everyday lives. The variety may be explained by the migration after the Turkish thraldom. Following the diseases of the head, eyes, nose, ears and throat, the so-called rheumatic diseases (sores and injuries), as part of people's hard days, were given more emphasis once more. The chapter closes with tooth diseases, dentition, secondary dentition, the treatment of toothache and decay and parasite-prevention. Particularly noteworthy are the diseases etiology puts down to some kind of living creature (a worm, a snake etc.) which has entered the body; its treatment involves the removing, sending away or denying of the disease, sending or digging it (back) in earth or injuring somebody else with it. Therapies applied recently, or even today have a long history that, according to records, goes back to the 18th century. Fixed texts have a longer history, the earliest being Bagolyai's (in 1488) and Bornemissza's (in 1578) incantations.