Traditional medicine: laugh or cry?
"Catch a rat, crush it and smear the baby with its blood"Svetlana Kuznetsova, Kommersant-Vlast No. 26-2010
The article was published on the Rockefeller website
275 years ago, in 1735, the Senate established punishments for healers who were tortured and imprisoned in a monastery for using conspiracies, and were sentenced to death if convicted again. But this did not prevent the use of strange and sometimes monstrous methods of treatment in the villages.
"It was punishable by burning in a log cabin"The case considered by the Senate in 1735 turned out to be typical of cases of witchcraft, sorcery and conspiracies, then called whisperings, which were considered by Russian judicial institutions for centuries.
Typical in the sense of the vagueness and low evidence of the charges and the confusion of the testimony of witnesses and accused. In view of this, the highest judicial instance of the Russian Empire decided to resort to the most reliable and proven method of clarifying the background of the case – torture. The torture of the accused women, however, did not bring any clarity to the circumstances of what happened, but some of them confessed to using whispers, while others did not, which became the basis for the decision of the Senate, which acquired the force of law for all subjects of the empire. Those who did not confess were acquitted, and those who could not withstand torture after corporal punishment were either sent to monasteries or given bail. At the same time, they were told that if they tried to escape from the monastery or were re-accused of witchcraft, as stated in the senate decree, "they would be executed by death without any mercy." There was nothing fundamentally new in this decision. The Senate only regulated and softened the penalties that existed since ancient times for witchcraft and quackery. Ethnographer and historian Elena Eleonskaya wrote about court cases of the XVII-XVIII centuries:
"Government officials treated the use of conspiracies very strictly; the investigation was conducted carefully, but the final decision was different, and the court did not always pass a death sentence. From these various judicial conclusions, the following observation can be made: in the XVII century, such witchcraft was punishable by death, which had a connection with criminal acts in essence – "... and the Bolkhovichi, the posadsky people, said that he, Savka, spoiled people with the root... and Savka Kurchenin was put in prison in Bolkhov," and it was ordered to find out "whether he, Savka, had killed anyone... whether by poisoning or some other kind of slander and whispering." Falling away from the faith, malice against the highest authority was associated in most cases with magic, with the use of conspiracy, and in such cases "heretical" speeches and letters were a vivid witness to crime, then the conspiracy was especially strictly considered and condemned. Mishka Svashevsky, after a long and complicated investigation, was burned; and the main reason for this severity was the renunciation of God found in him and a conspiracy with an appeal to demons, and the magus Dorotheus paid with his life for sending evil words to Tsar Peter in the wind. Witchcraft, which had no consequences, was nevertheless punished by prison, whipping, exile, as an act in which an unquestionably evil intention was seen. The seriously fearful attitude towards witchcraft and conspiracy gradually changed during the XVII century, and the rulings of the middle of the XVIII century differed significantly from the verdicts of the previous century. What in the XVII century was punishable by burning in a log cabin, in the XVIII century causes a resolution only "to subject to a six-year ban with sending to a monastery, so that he (the guilty one), regretting that in his intentions he is not acting on God, but on demons... He believed in hope, brought true repentance and, practicing fasting and prayers, asked the All-merciful Lord God to forsake his crimes."
"They "tortured" the eyes"Such a change in judicial practice was explained not only and not so much by a decrease in the number of malice against the highest authority by magic curses.
Apparently, the harm caused by healers and healers, albeit slowly, but steadily decreased, following their number. In the cities, they were replaced by doctors and pharmacists, whose number has been constantly growing since Peter the Great. And in the villages, no matter how strange it may sound, the landowners gradually began to replace the healers.
This happened after in the first quarter of the XVIII century in Russia, roving sellers of various medicinal drugs developed a rapid activity, very skillfully advertising and promoting their products. They brought no more health benefits to the villagers than homegrown fortune-tellers, but at the same time they took very significant money from the peasants at that time. And this circumstance could not but worry the owners of the estates. The peasants spent their last pennies on useless and sometimes dangerous powders and potions, which in the form of tolls could replenish their master's budget. But, most importantly, having taken a panacea for all ailments, the main asset of any landowner – audit souls – either remained ill for life, or left it altogether.
That is why the most savvy landowners decided to take the matter of treating peasants into their own hands. Large landowners hired doctors for their estates, who, in addition to their own families, were obliged to treat peasants. That's just the process of healing the villagers in most cases did not get better, because the villagers were afraid of foreign doctors and gentiles.
"A simple Russian man," wrote Ivan Pantyukhov, MD, in 1869, "and still treats doctors and pharmacists with great distrust. He considers hospitals to be institutions from which a rare living person will get out, and doctor's prescriptions are something Kabbalistic and, perhaps, unorthodox. Although those times have passed, when doctors, like Germans and non-Christians who communicate with unclean forces, were killed for causing diseases and poisoning water; but even to this day, apocryphal, schismatic books, in which doctors and all those treated by them are cursed, do not remain without influence on the people."
But the middle-class landlords and small-scale gentlemen, who, due to lack of funds, could not hire doctors and therefore entrusted the task of peasant health improvement to their own wives, did not lose. The peasants quickly realized that the hostess would not cause damage to her property, and they used the proposed treatment without fear. Soon, some successful experiments developed into an All-Russian fashion, and then turned into a part of the life of landowners and a kind of duty passed down from generation to generation.
"Most of the landowners of the good old time," wrote the doctor Eduard Zalensky in 1908, "willingly served their duty in the treatment of the peasantry. That by doing this they mainly satisfied their moral urge to alleviate the suffering of their neighbor, I could see from conversations with old peasants, who often repeated one thing about this: "Doctoring in a learned way, bar - from a kind heart." Some of the landowners were seriously interested in home medicine, of course, they were constantly engaged in it and even developed specialists from themselves, and most of all in the "eye part". In this specialty, they, according to the characteristic expression of the peasantry, "tortured" the eyes. Such an expression can be taken in the literal sense and all his real wit can be recognized for him, if we keep in mind those medicinal remedies that the landowners used for their eye patients. With "tusk" (turbidity) on the "eyes" and in general with eyesores, granulated sugar or powder made up of equal parts of ginger, sugar and graphite scraped from a pencil was used for powdering; with lacrimation, drops from vodka or from an aqueous solution of "white vitriol", now called in the medicine man's way, were in use. "grymzoyu"; in case of eye pain, spanish flies were necessarily put behind the ears and rose water was given for the lotion. If you add arnica, breast tea, lime and elderflower, chamomile, mint, sage, "smelling" (ammonia) alcohol and a "viscous" patch to these means, then this will be the entire main medicinal arsenal that was at the disposal of compassionate landowners."
At the same time, the village healers, midwives, chiropractors and ore miners, who were treated by bloodletting, together with sorcerers and fortune-tellers of various varieties, did not disappear anywhere. There were fewer of them, but they found patients among those who were unlucky with the landowner, or those whose mistress disdained treating this or that ailment. And sorcerers and fortune-tellers created their own clientele by directing the "evil eye" or "damage" on gullible peasants, and then removing it.
"Peretopi it with g ... m, with dog"The time for the revenge of doctors from the people and for the people came after the abolition of serfdom in 1861.
"Previously," Vasily Deriker, a doctor of medicine, wrote in 1865, "the landowner considered it his duty to take care of the health of his own peasants, and with the new system, this care lies with the peasants themselves, with rural societies." However, as Deriker noted, the task of providing all societies with doctors looked completely impossible:
"Some suggested that more doctors should be assigned to places in the volosts at the expense of a special fee. This, of course, one must hope, will settle down with time. But as long as, at present, and all the available doctors in any case will not be enough for the entire rural population. Every sick person needs an ambulance: otherwise, a large and sometimes fatal one can easily grow out of a small illness, and a doctor who is obliged to keep up to provide benefits to patients settled in a large space, life in continuous travel will be difficult, especially with a small monetary reward... Moreover, a learned doctor is more and more a city dweller by his lifestyle, habits and needs, and reluctantly settles in the village, where, of course, he can be useful to others, but where he himself is not free and it is much more difficult for him to engage in his science."
As a result, the peasants had no choice but to seek help from healers, and specialists concerned about the health of the people – to study the methods of traditional medicine. Having learned about a certain method of treatment from a knowledgeable person, most often a doctor or a paramedic, village healers try it on themselves or their loved ones, and, convinced of its effectiveness, begin to practice it as healers. And so that no one would guess that we are talking about a fairly well-known pharmacy or medicinal plant, they arrange the treatment with mystery, create an appropriate entourage in their huts, and most importantly, invent spells that the patient perceives as an important and most secret part of the treatment. Some of the healers, in addition to everything, disguised the medicine itself in various ways, mixing various dyes or bitter additives to it in order to hide its real color and taste and not produce competitors for themselves.
That's just competing healers and healers still appeared, and, as many doctors who observed their work wrote, they copied mainly spells, spells and entourage. But the remedy was either absent or was replaced by anything that caused huge and sometimes irreparable harm to patients.
The peasants could only figure out whose drugs and conspiracies helped and whose did not, by trial and error, and therefore traveled with the patient to all the surrounding and remote healers and healers, getting to the doctors or when nothing helped, or when it was too late to help.
Eduard Zalensky recalled one similar case when the grandmother-healers, although they were able to diagnose, offered a completely meaningless and monstrous method of treatment that did not give any "benefit", as the benefit was called in the local dialect:
"In the room where my apartment was and where I received outpatient patients, a woman with a baby dragged herself to me one day, screaming mercilessly. Having unwrapped the extremely contaminated "gunki" (diapers), she showed me her "baby". His thin little body was all covered with dried blood. To my question about the reason for this condition of the child, she told me the following: "My breadwinner, and wherever I dragged him: Kolka's abyss came from the grandmother. Yes, they didn't give me all the money. Some say that there are heavy teeth in it, and some – gnaw. The other day they gave me one grandmother. Here she is, you are our breadwinner, and she advised this: you say, then, a rat, crush it and smear it with her blood, then, a baby. Only there is no benefit from eutovo. You can see for yourself how the child screams. Maybe you will give what ease of Andel darling?!" The child had stomach colic, which in the language of grandmothers is called "gnawing"."
But the doctors were most impressed by the ease with which the peasants used the medical advice of complete strangers.
"Unfortunately,– wrote Gavriil Popov, Doctor of Medicine, "our peasant often treats all the disgusting and ridiculous remedies usually recommended by healers and other knowledgeable and experienced people in the village without any criticism and, usually reasonable, is completely overwhelmed by the authority of the adviser's tone, the thoroughness of his advice and especially references to former examples.
"I've done nothing with him," one such peasant with an abscess on his finger complains in a peasant company. – And I went for money, and for money, but there's still no use, – it must be something I've said.
–And I'll tell you what, my dear," one of the women interrupts him. "My nephew's arm was hurting in just such a manner, too, that's how he suffered. And his people taught him: take you a clean tar and grind it with g... m, with a dog, here, ida dog us ... t, there and take it, there and take it... Together, peretopit yes into this, into the hot then into everything straight and kunai finger, straight and kunai.
– So, – muses the peasant, – so, g ... on to take and with tar to melt it?
– Yes, yes, – picks up the woman, – g ... on the dog, g... on, yes, with the tar it, yes with the tar it is to melt... So you'll see the light. My nephew has been everywhere, but only saw the light, as he tried this medicine."
"Blood from the heart of a black goat"The opinions of doctors regarding the common methods of treatment after the first years of observation of the healers were divided.
The overwhelming majority of doctors recognized that the people believed more in healers than doctors, and offered to fight it strictly. And only a few, among whom was Vasily Deriker, offered to take an even closer look at the healers, choose from them those who are really capable of healing, but cannot get an education by the will of circumstances, and, having trained, make them assistants to doctors:
"We firmly stand for the fact that it is not necessary to persecute healers, but to try to reason with them and encourage them to make useful people. Only deception and dishonest deeds need to be persecuted and denounced. Why drive the knower of anything? There is a benefit in all knowledge. Give everything here, the smallest: let it serve society, and society – encourage, reward for honest work. People will stop believing in witchcraft and the whispering of ignoramuses and deceivers by themselves when they see that even without this it is possible to find help in illness easier and better, and when there are more literate and knowledgeable people."
Deriker also suggested carefully studying the methods of folk medicine, checking them and allowing the use of those that really help the sick. He himself did a lot of work collecting and systematizing quack methods of treatment, and found out that most of them are based on the treatment of medicinal herbs. At the same time, other not very pleasant means were analyzed, which in the middle of the XIX century were used not only in Russia, for example, blood:
"In eastern Russia, falling sickness is treated with the blood of a hunted hare. To do this, the hare is chased and scared almost to death in a locked place, then the throat is cut, blood is collected, dried, ground into powder and this powder is given to the patient. According to popular belief, it is necessary to scare a hare on a certain day in the month of February. In Germany there is a similar belief and remedy. The correspondent recalls that in 1810, as a student in Marburg and being on the scaffold with Professor Bartels, who performed galvanic experiments on beheaded criminals, he saw how one villager picked up a small glass of "blood-horror" at the moment of execution, drank it and ran like a madman. It turned out that it was a suffering case, with the permission of the executioner, who used the medicine. In Poland – blood from the ear of a black cat, 4-5 drops in a glass of wine, one step, against erysipelas, at the beginning of it. In Yaroslav. g., the blood of a partridge from an external eyesore is let into the eye. In Europe. In Turkey, to facilitate teething, the gums are rubbed with a freshly cut comb of a black cock, certainly black, because black blood is hotter. This remedy is also used in Russia. Estonians consider blood from the heart of a black goat to be a very effective remedy for abdominal diseases. They take it in beer."
Almost as widely used, according to Deriker, was manure:
"In Russia, from paralysis (not from aches?) they bury the patient in warm horse manure or cover him with a thick layer and pour bread wine over that layer. In the Caucasus, the wounded man's coat is encircled with cow droppings on top of the windows inside, with a finger stripe three widths wide. The meaning of this border is interpreted differently, but what exactly it should serve is unknown. Interpretations, of course, are more or less emblematic and superstitious. In European Turkey, a water patient is put in manure up to the throat, which excites a strong perspiration... In Estonia, against fever, they put a bag of sheep droppings in the drink. The same droppings from inflammation of the glands of the poultice. From jaundice – goose droppings in powder. In Sweden, a suffering member is covered with hot (heated) chicken droppings from chills. They assure that it is very real. In Poland, about 60 years ago, a poor old man volunteered to cure a lady of cancer that they wanted to cut out, and cured her with an ointment consisting of equal parts of fresh cow oil and sheep droppings. Two tablespoons of sheep droppings are boiled in a bottle of beer and given to drink at night for catarrhal fever. In the same place, pig droppings are applied externally from scrofulous tumors, hot, in a bath, with other internal medications. In the same place, dried pigeon droppings are given from scrofula in powder, a teaspoon daily, with coffee, for 8 days. From the head scab, they wash their heads with a decoction of pigeon droppings in beer, and the next day they will smear with fresh unsalted cow oil. This is repeated several times."
In many cases, when mentioning the effectiveness of certain means, Deriker referred to the experiments of foreign medical luminaries. However, as soon as he himself undertook to check this or that means of folk medicine, the result turned out to be very deplorable:
"In Germany, a live pigeon is applied to the anus during a seizure in children against a parent. Canstadt mentions this remedy, of which he himself has seen the most undoubted actions. The attached pigeon soon dies and the seizure stops immediately. This remark prompted many doctors to test this remedy, and the reality is confirmed, by the way, by Blick, in Schwanebeck, and I am at little Sh. I experienced it for an hour and a half and didn't see anything sensible. Two pigeons were consumed. One remained healthy, the other then frowned a little, probably because he was rumpled. Both left the next day. Convulsions did not succumb to this remedy at all."
The vast majority of doctors also did not believe in the success of common medical methods. However, it was not so much this as the change in the economic conditions of life in the village and the country as a whole that prompted them to seriously fight with the healers. Universities were producing more and more doctors, and in rural areas, despite regular crop failures and other misfortunes, strong owners began to appear, not only having wealth, but also imbued with previously alien ideas of hygiene and wanting to maintain health. So for the income from servicing this rich layer of villagers, certified doctors had to fight with healers and other figures of ordinary medicine. And the fight promised to be serious.
(Ending: "Pouring boiling water on the head is done with diligence.")
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru12.07.2010