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

TANULMÁNYOK - Hoppáy Mihály: „Anya és gyermek" a magyar folklórban — A hiedelemvilág etnoszemiotikai megközelítése (angol nyelven)

-90 Comm. Hist. Artis Med. Suppl. 11- 12 (1979) Th. A. Sebeok, in his brilliant study defined it in the following words: "Galen (130—200) taught that semiotics constitutes one of the six principal branches of medicine and is, in turn, divided into three parts: »in preaterium cognitionem, in praesentium inspectionem et futurorum providentiam,« meaning that the physician's threefold preoccupation must be with semiosis of the here and now, or diagnostics, and its twin temporal projections into the anamnestic past (the complete case history of the patient) and the prognostic future (extrapolation to determine the most likely course of the disease as interpreted from the foregoing)"

. (Sebeok 1976:8). Six centuries prior to Galen the famous philosopher and the father of clinical semiotics, Hippocrates (cca. 460—cca. 377 BC), also dealt with the theory of medicine. "The reason why Hippocrates looms so large in the history of semiotics (to say nothing of medicine) is that while in archaic medical practice the physician was preoccupied largely by the nature of diseases, its causes and processes, he himself focused on the starting point of all medical action: »the sick man and his complaints—that is, the symptoms of disease« (Sigerist 1961: 275), and that, in his interpretation of this primordial category of signs—which, as Ch.S. Peirce once observed, „have no utter er" but "become [signs] by virtue of being really connected with their objects", are that is, in a more familiar parlance, species of indices theoretical consideration already began to play a very important part. In the second chapter of one of his finest books in the Corpus, entitled Prognostic, Hippocrates gave the description of the face of a moribund patient (for which the technical term fades hippocratica is still used today), that has become the classic example of clinical semiotic interpretation of syndromes, i.e., stable, rule-governed configurations of symptoms" (Sebeok 1976:6.). A fine practitioner of medicine, philosophy and semiotics was the Iranian-Tadjik Avicenna (Ibn Sinna, 980—1037) whose work on the problem of universalae had a profound effect on the 16th century school of European scholasticism. It is no coincidence of academic history that the highest degree in philosophy and philology is designated by the term "Doctor"' — which also means physician in many languages. Useful data for semiotic studies are widely scattered in medieval Hungarian medical texts. Such literature is a storehouse of information for folklorists (and of course for students of ethnomedicine). Ferenc Pápai-Páriz's Pax Corporis (1690) for instance, gives a description of the causes of diseases, their signs (symptoms), meanings and cures. The organization of this work reminds one of the well accepted tripartite division of semiotics, namely syntax, semantics and pragmatics. To illustrate this organization, let me use one of its passages on the condition of "Hypochondriaca Melancholia": Signs: much spitting . . . greater food intake than the capacity of the stomach would allow . . . etc. Meanings: although this malaise is not mortal, it can be prolonged and burdensome . . . etc. Remedies: purgatives . . . for the removal of dangerous fluids of the body . . . etc. (Páriz-Pápai 1690:228-230) The above historical data may be adequate to support the notion that ethnomedicine is at the crossroads of several branches of science, and therefore it may be viewed as a truly interdisciplinary science (Sterly 1974, Bromley-Voronov 1977:17—18). A Hungarian ethnographer (Vajkai 1948. II. 18:2) reminded us that "for the analysis