Antall József szerk.: Népi gyógyítás Magyarországon / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 11-12. (Budapest, 1979)

Antall József: Lecturis salutem

LECTURIS SALUTEM The Semmelweis Medical Historical Museum, Library and Archives as well as the Hungarian Society for the History of Medicine have — ever since their foundation — included the field of ethnomedicine into their collection interest and research activities. In the last ten years this was proved by two exhibitions arranged on ethnomedicine, by the separate folk medical section of the International Congress of the History of Medicine held in 1974 in Budapest, by the lively activity of the folk medical section of the Hungarian Society for the History of Medicine as well as by the volume "Ethnomedicine in Hungary" (Comm. Hist. Artis Med. Suppl. 7 — 8) issued in 1975. In the preface to the above mentioned volume, we have already exposed our views on the value of ethnomedicine, on the problems of its evaluation. Ethnomedicine, as an interdisciplinary field of science between medical history and ethnography, raises several questions to be answered, thus providing the researcher with a field to work on, with possibilities to discover sources, to collect and arrange data. The increased international interest allows a survey of the comparative methods as well as to clear the theoretical or even science philosophical problems of the given discipline. Ethnomedicine, in its methods of research and claims for synthesis covers the different trends and changing approaches of the development of social sciences, history and ethnography first of all. There appear side by side works following modest descriptive methods and essays trying to adopt the most recent or sometimes the most fashionable trends. Papers reflecting fresh social views alterate with outmoded or just utopistical works winking at a presumed world of the 21st century or not once with mere refllections of the individual emotional atmosphere, the spiritual coreography of their flirt with exotic worlds. We think to be useless those disputes carried on by some of our researchers of ethnomedicine seemingly as a question of prestige on the origine of folk knowledge. We feel it evident that folk medicine, rooted in the depth of folk knowledge and belief system, had absorbed the many thousand year old experiences of the people, the real and psycho-therapeutical surplus knowledge produced by the special gifts of healing-medicating men as well as by the "descended" science of earlier academic medicine intermediated by old books, calendars and the representatives of "medicina pastoralis". There is no use speaking of priority or advocating some sort of sovereign wealth of knowledge. No doubt, one must not avoid making distinctions when evaluating the medical knowledge of natural peoples and that of peoples arrived at different stages of civilization, since this factor is indispensable in the proportion of "genuine" and "descended" knowledge either is geographical or in social or cultural historical respect. The importance of ethnomedical research is beyond argue since its