Folk medicine: the gods themselves are powerless to fight against stupidity

"Pouring boiling water on the head is done with diligence"Svetlana Kuznetsova, Kommersant-Vlast No. 27-2010

The article was published in the blog "SocietyStyle"
(End. For the beginning, see the article "Catch a rat, crush it and smear the baby with its blood.")

At the turn of the XIX-XX centuries in Russia, the long–standing competition between sorcerers and healers, on the one hand, and doctors, on the other, intensified. As Svetlana Kuznetsova, a correspondent of the "Authorities", found out, during this struggle, doctors collected and analyzed all methods of popular treatment up to the most murderous.

"Does not attach importance to cleanliness, food, or drink"

By the end of the XIX century, which was splendidly called the century of great scientific discoveries and technological progress, in all civilized countries, medicine was losing its position under the onslaught of medical achievements. And in Russia, in the same years, life writers and doctors stated the usual widespread spread of medicine in all kinds and forms, not only in the remote bear corners of the country, but also in the capital of the empire – St. Petersburg. A connoisseur of folk treatment , Doctor of Medicine Gavriil Popov , wrote in 1903: 

"Many people think in vain that quackery has completely outlived its time, has no foundation and as a system and profession does not exist. Quackery is an old legend, but for many places in our fatherland it is still new, and we have to believe it even now." 

The main reason for the prosperity of healers, many prominent figures of Russian medicine considered the indestructible grandfather's traditions, together with the hopeless poverty of the people and the corresponding horrific living conditions.

"Centuries," wrote Dr. Popov, "during which the people were left to themselves in the matter of healing, and the very weak development of true concepts about the essence of diseases among them created such strong conditions for the prosperity of medicine that the medicine man, this only healer of the people, almost until very recently, often at the present time, he is a force to be reckoned with in the village... The best aspirations of convinced and dedicated zemstvo doctors have always been shattered by the difficulty, and sometimes the direct impossibility in many cases to apply scientific medicine to the practice of rural reality. Many conditions, among which a village doctor has to work, are really insurmountable: a doctor very often has to treat gastrointestinal diseases in the complete absence of any possibility for a peasant to observe at least the most elementary diet; he has to treat a lot of skin diseases, various kinds of suppurative processes, wounds, ulcers, etc. with dirt, with which the body is covered, the clothes are soaked and the peasant's hut is full; in the same situation and often in a hut crowded with four-legged tenants in addition to family members, the doctor must often fight infectious diseases, various kinds of typhus, scarlet fever, diphtheria, etc. The enormity of the distances with which the doctor must be considered, the randomness and fleetness of the appearance the peasant or peasant has it, and the inability to constantly monitor the gradual course of the disease of rural patients increases the difficulty of the doctor's position. If we add to this that the peasant, according to the whole warehouse of his concepts about the essence of diseases, is far from rational medicine and that in most cases he does not attach importance to health, neither cleanliness, nor food, nor drink, that due to fatal and difficult to eliminate conditions, he will, for example, drink water from a well infected with the feces of a neighbor or relative from the same family who has fallen ill with typhoid fever – a combination of favorable moments and coincidences is needed so that under such conditions any epidemic that has begun does not spread, some individual patient recovers or gets relief."

"Acts on the mental side of the patient"

To turn the situation in their favor, the doctors began to study the healers and their methods. Rare notes of zemstvo doctors of that time dispense with stories about how trusted people introduced the doctor to a witch doctor or a village sorcerer. However, in every province and almost in every county there were not only their own folk healers, but also their own ideas about diseases and ways to cure them. And often diametrically different from each other. That is why ethnographers who began collecting information from places about folk traditions, customs and lifestyle, including, of course, quackery, with the help of local correspondents, including zemstvo doctors, paramedics, teachers, priests and minor officials, provided great help to doctors.

With the help of correspondents, it was possible to establish those common features that were present in the manipulations of all rural witches and witches. One of them, from the Bolkhovsky district of the Oryol province, wrote:

"If the healers do not achieve the direct goal of helping the patient, then they use various mechanical actions used in conspiracies – stroking, tapping and whispering significantly calm the nerves of the patient. A certain atmosphere and mystery, the smells of some herbs, fumigation - all this somehow affects the mental side of the patient, and especially the peasant, who believes in both the power of the devil and the power of the sorcerer. It is enough for a sick peasant to have a slight uplift of spirit so that the improvement in the state of the disease is attributed to the mysterious will of the sorcerer. Many village healers, having started their profession by quackery, were so convinced of their strength and entered the role that even under oath they say they know something. Naturally, such self-confidence of the healer is transmitted to the patient. Just as the same medicine, but prescribed by different doctors, can be of great benefit in the case when it is prescribed by a doctor who inspires more confidence in himself, so simple water can perform miracles with faith in a healer. I also explain the success of healers and grandmothers by the fact that peasants really like to talk about their illness, or, as they put it, to take their soul away. Meanwhile, doctors often cut them off in mid-sentence, without giving them a chance to speak out. Leaving the doctor with the medicine, but in a bad mood of the spirit, the peasants think: "Well, he didn't question me, but also gave me medicine; it should be more to get rid of." If at the same time a tasteless medicine is given, then faith in the doctor is already completely lost: "He gave water." The healer's case is different. The healer will try to assure him of the great benefits of her medicine and will bring many cases of healing with her help. The peasant returns from the medicine woman in a good mood, and besides, her medicine is very bitter and has a color, which, according to the peasants, is very important. This is not like the doctor's, whose medicine is both colorless and tasteless, and the portion is respectable at the healer's: she ordered a whole mug to drink, but the doctor only ordered a spoon."

"The power of the venomous gaze"

An equally important part of the descriptions of folk customs turned out to be that the belief in the supernatural abilities of various grandparents was based on ancient, pre-Christian ideas about spirits and witchcraft as the sources of most of the body-encompassing misfortunes. The collectors of ethnographic information themselves were amazed at the originality and perfect fantasticism of the people's ideas about the most important, in their opinion, sources of diseases – corruption and the evil eye produced by sorcerers. They differed only in the fact that the damage was done deliberately, and they could jinx without malicious intent, if an eye-catching person possessed witchcraft. Dr. Popov summarized numerous examples of common misconceptions sent from the outback:

"The ways in which spoilage is carried out are extremely interesting. Most often it is launched by the wind, by water, mixed with food and drink, and sometimes it is achieved by a spell... Damage in the form of a spell and given in food and drink invariably enters into the one to whom it is "given", and let loose by wind and water – on whom it falls... Some powders and special poisons are also allowed here, and sometimes something completely inexplicable. "The sorcerer will notice," the peasant explains such damage, "that you want, for example, to swim, and let this witchcraft float on the water" (Eagle. lips. and y.). Individual damage is somewhat more understandable. Here some unknown drugs and drinks are mixed with bread, dishes, kvass, beer, vodka, tea, etc. Folk fantasy feeds on numerous and very diverse stories, where such damage and ways of obtaining it are depicted in all kinds of forms. In one case, they tell how a woman was spoiled on noodles and how, after eating noodles, she immediately "began to shout at voices," and another, whom the witch doctor gave to eat a boiled egg, "immediately began to roll into a ball, and some invisible force began to lift up so easily, like a rubber ball bouncing" (Bryansk and Orlovsky u. Orl. lips.) ... There are many other ways of spoilage. To this end, various charmed objects are thrown on the road: it is worth lifting such an object – and the person is already spoiled (Skopinsky u. Ryazan. lips.). It is also reported that sorcerers throw some small balls rolled from sheep's wool, with an admixture of cat and human hair under the feet of the intended person (Gryazovetsky u. Vologda. lips.). The sorcerers achieve damage, as if by smearing the hair of the intended victim in the pipe, sewing them with the feathers of unknown birds into pillows, and also throwing them into the oven, putting them under the wall in the hut and burying them under the gate (Penza. lips. and., Karachevsky u. Eagle. lips.). The ways in which sorcerers manage to cause damage are sometimes positively elusive, and even the imagination of a Russian peasant, inclined to believe in the possibility of the existence of the most extraordinary things, stops before explaining them."

However, the peasants considered personal communication with the sorcerer to be the most terrible.

"In some places of the Rostov District (Yaroslav. Gubernia)," wrote Dr. Popov, "the opinion that thin people spoil mainly through touch is, apparently, even prevailing... From the Penza district, they report how the sorcerer, being angry at one woman, grabbed her by the shoulder, and she fell ill from that moment. When he met her, he constantly called out to her, and she immediately fell to the ground and began to beat... According to some Yegoryevsky peasants (Ryazan. Gubernia), there are sorcerers who can dry up a person or drive him crazy with one glance. The same opinion is held by the Dorogobuzhsky peasants (Resin lips), assuming that people lose weight and get sick from one glance of a sorcerer."

Especially terrible sorcerers, according to the data collected by ethnographers, were considered to be viritniki. In the work of Gabriel Popov it was said:

"In some places (Volkhovsky u. Orl. lips.) this ability to produce damage and harm with a glance is attributed to a special kind of sorcerers, the so-called viritnik. The Viritnik has such a venomous look that if he thinks of jinxing someone, he can jinx it in one minute so that he will go to the next world in one hour, unless he takes energetic measures to destroy the viritnik's gaze. Therefore, he inspires much more fear than the most powerful sorcerer or witch. The latter can be beaten in their hearts, but never a viritnik: his look destroys all such attempts. In such cases, he takes three steps away, seemingly directs such a look at the opponents that they immediately begin to shout: "Forgive us! We won't beat you, just take out your poison." At this moment, they feel aches all over their body, they begin to feel dizzy, there is pain in their heart, and their hands become so stiff that they cannot be lifted up, not only beaten. According to popular opinion, if a broom is angry at an entire village and wants to lime it, it can destroy the whole, with all the cattle and all the creatures living in it, within one month. Even the birds that will be flying through the village at this time, and they fall to the ground dead – that's the power of the viritnik's poisonous gaze (Eagle lips and ears)."

"Rule "the fart" bone"

The village sorcerers used people's faith in corruption and the evil eye without any remorse. Rural doctors ironically described the struggle going on in the villages between sorcerers and peasants. For example, one of the most terrible types of spoilage was considered a hall, when the ears of corn were wrapped in a special way or twisted and tied with hair, as a result of which the grain was causing damage not only from these ears, but also from the entire strip. And the one who ate any of these grains, according to peasant beliefs, fell ill for a long time and hard. Therefore, in order to ward off the attack from themselves, they had to call a sorcerer, and they tried to sell the damaged grain. And to prevent breakdowns, the fields were guarded as carefully as possible before harvesting.

The latter circumstance, as the doctors wrote, seriously complicated the life of the witchcraft tribe. The sorcerer needed to sneak into the field unnoticed, leaving no traces, and quickly make a hall. After all, if the peasants caught such magicians red-handed, the cruelest reprisals followed.

At the same time, both doctors and ethnographers noted that the people deal with sorcerers only out of necessity and are extremely reluctant to pay them. The most common fee for sorcerers was vodka, and therefore among this category of folk healers there were quite a lot of drunkards who dragged out a rather miserable existence.

The attitude of the people towards those who, according to their own statements, treated with conspiracies and various means, being blessed with the divine word, was completely different. Unlike sorcerers, they went to them openly, and paid very, very decent money, which, to put it mildly, caused misunderstanding and bewilderment of doctors who resented the fact that competitors use unsuitable methods that do not lead to a cure. Another important detail noted by the researchers was that the healers had a rather narrow specialization.

"Since it is difficult for one person," stated Dr. Popov, "to satisfy all the requests concerning human ailments, almost every such healer chooses some kind of separate medical manipulation, in the production of which he acquires a special skill and thanks to which he becomes known among the surrounding population. Thus, a kind of specialization of healers appears. Among such specialists there are special "nobles" for internal diseases who give various herbs for drinking to patients – dry St. John's wort, mint, chamomile, currant or birch buds, etc., substances such as tar, turpentine, vitriol, "bel" (sulema), or fumigating patients with cinnabar and herbs. These same "nobles" often stop bleeding by covering wounds with soot, ash, tobacco, crushed sugar, a devil's finger, or treat abscesses by applying plasters to their own products."

Chiropractors were no less in demand in the villages:

"Another class of specialists are chiropractors, among whom there are often female persons, the so–called baushki. Although in rare cases, some of the healers seem to have the art of distinguishing dislocations and setting some of them, for example, dislocation of the shoulder, but in most cases they take sprains, simple bruises of joints or fractures of the articular ends of bones for dislocations; having eliminated their displacement and putting a bandage, they say that the dislocation is set... The situation with fractures is no better for chiropractors. Bandages for fractures made of splints, birch bark, etc. are not applied by chiropractors in all cases, and most fractures, especially of the upper extremities, are fused without any bandages. In some cases, the healer promises that the bone will grow together without any help, according to his one slander (Krasninsky U. Resin, lips., Karachevsky u. Orl. lips.). The results of such surgical therapy of chiropractors are long-standing dislocations and improperly fused fractures."

Continued to be popular at the end of the XIX century among the peasants and the bloodletting known since ancient times, which medicine has long abandoned. Popov 's work stated:

"Such specialists as ore-throwers and ore-throwers have not completely disappeared in the village either. The belief that it can be hard for a person from blood makes some people repeat throwing blood every year, usually in the spring, or even several times a year... The healer uses a penknife or an old razor to make a longitudinal incision on the back, near the shoulder blade, so deep that the blood flows in a stream, and releases it about the size of a teacup. When, according to the healer, the bad blood has all gone out, he applies a cloth soaked in cold water to the wound. If the blood does not flow in a stream, but only barely leaks, the healer sucks it out and spits it out."

There were also specialists with extremely narrow specialization:

"Special specialists also treat deafness and pull sulfur out of the ears. After washing the ears with water, put in them small pieces of camphor wrapped in cotton wool or a thin cloth, with leaves of fragrant geranium. Then, having rolled up a tube from a piece of paper soaked in wax, one end is inserted into the ear, and the other is lit. This operation is considered the most effective against deafness: all the sulfur that lays the ears, even if it has been accumulating for years, will burn out or it will be pulled out by fire on paper (Cherepovetsky U. Novg. lips.). Special specialists-trichs (masseuses), or steamers, are engaged exclusively in rubbing patients in pairs, i.e. in furnaces and baths... Some of the three with diarrhea in children rule the "fart" (coccygeal) bone. Depending on the idea that some types of childhood diarrhea develop from the coagulation of the coccygeal bone outward, such trichs, having lathered a finger and inserted into the child's anus, produce stroking movements, pressing and bending this bone from the inside (Saransky U. Penza. lips.)... The same specialists, when foreign bodies get into the eyes, which often happens especially during threshing and winnowing bread, turn the eye on the ring and take out a speck with their hands or lick it with their tongue. Tongue licking is used by them for other eye diseases, and sometimes for abscesses (Vologda. and Eagle. lips.). One of our employees informed us about a case where such a suction of pus from the cavity of an abscess was performed with a flux (Vasilsursky u. Lower lip.). Some of the employees even report such skilled workers who suck the urine of infants with their mouths during detention (Cherepovetsky U.)."

Another type of healers was called guesses – guessing diseases, and its not quite characteristic representative was described in 1910 by the doctor Nikolai Rudinsky:

"An interesting fool was in the village of Podovechye of our county – Annushka... It was a girl of about thirty... Annushka was literally naked, i.e. without any dress and cover... Annushka's body was all black from the smoky izbyan soot. Annushka has never been washed. The fool lived in the yard, in a special hut, small to the point of impossibility and specially made for her. In this special hut, she was tied on an iron chain, like dogs are tied. An iron ring with a large iron chain was driven into the wall of the hut, and with this chain the fool was chained to her belt... Annushka did not give any medicine. She only found out what kind of illness the newcomer had. According to the popular perception, it was a fool and at the same time ugad, i.e. a pure diagnostician, because she did not give any medicine. Annushka always said only 2-3 words to the patient who came, and nothing more, and then even when her relatives are intimidating, otherwise, perhaps, she won't say anything."

What exactly the fool said and how her relatives interpreted these words to the suffering did not matter much. The main thing remained that they believed in the correctness of the guessed ailment. And faith in treatment, even meaningless, as doctors who have studied medicine have stated, is the main key to the success of homegrown healers.

"The cat's testicles should be cut out"

Moreover, the peasants, even without any healers and healers, believed in a variety of remedies, and in the first place in the Orthodox country were miraculous shrines, which, however, as doctors and ethnographers stated, were not used in accordance with church canons. For example, it was believed that during difficult childbirth, the opening of the royal gates in the temple helps to relieve the burden. And, despite the direct prohibition, the priests, heeding the pleas of the relatives of the sufferer, performed this action. Another non-canonical way of using shrines, as they wrote from the places, turned out to be the use of venerated icons for toothache. It was believed that the icon should be gnawed to ease the torment. There was also a remedy for mental retardation, which did not allow one to study literacy and numeracy well in parochial schools. Caring parents believed that if a piece cut off from the rope of the church bell was tied to the child's cross, the child would begin to answer the lesson loudly and smartly. However, the people considered the procession to be perhaps the most important therapeutic event with the use of shrines.

"An extremely interesting medical act," wrote Dr. Popov, "is crawling under the shrine of the holy relics and under the miraculous icons. The belief in the healing power of this act is more or less widespread in very many places and is a fairly common phenomenon of many religious processions. By the time of such a move, especially if some revered local icon participates in it, patients, adults and children are laid out along the way so that icons can be passed over and carried over them, while healthy ones bend down and squat for this purpose. Sometimes such sneaking takes on a purely spontaneous character, and the desire to commit this act unconsciously engulfs the entire crowd present. Here is how an eyewitness describes this phenomenon when the relics of the Venerable are placed around the cathedral, in the Novoezersk Monastery (Novg. gub.). Kirill Novoezersky: "Priests lift up and take out the shrine, the police barely restrain the crowd. But the efforts are in vain, the crowd flows in an unstoppable stream under the sacred shrine: every believer, and especially the sick, wants to pass. It takes several hours to walk around the cathedral, the procession is moving so slowly.""

And yet, with the greatest confidence, the peasants treated those methods of treatment that they had reached with their own mind and their own experience.

"Using as medical means," it was said in the work of Dr. Popov, "all these objects of his simple household use, seeing the healing value in each of them and trying one or the other, the peasant remains satisfied if the applied remedy turns out to be useful in any respect – it will stop the bleeding, reduce the painful feeling pain, will accelerate the maturation of the abscess, etc., and after that no longer pays any attention to the harm of this remedy in all other respects. Such a remedy easily becomes in the category of constantly used for this disease and is recommended to others with perfect conviction and authority... In some places, for fractures, a powder of dried crushed crayfish is used, and in others, fresh crushed crayfish or molasses mixed with barley malt are tied (Bolkhovsky and Karachevsky u. Orl. lips.). Sometimes "brick oil" lubrication is used, which is considered more expensive than gold in case of fractures. It is prepared as follows: take a well-dried brick, finely ground and calcined in a frying pan. After letting it cool down, they put it in a pot, pour hemp or poppy oil and boil it on fire, then filter it through a rag and – the drug is ready (Cherepovets U. Novg. lips.). Very special remedies are recommended for gunshot and some types of bitten wounds. It turns out that it is good to apply grated cannabis to gunshot wounds, since it "expels" bullets. When a rabid dog or wolf is bitten, warm pigeon meat should be applied to the wound or, having turned the dried queen bee into powder, one half should be taken inside, and the other sprinkled on the bitten place. When a snake is stung, the wound should be smeared with sulfur from the ear and the whole person should be smeared with pure tar (Bolkhovsky and Karachevsky u. Orl. lips.). In other cases, the best remedy is rubbing the bitten place with herring or applying live frogs to it, which should be replaced by new ones as soon as the frog dies (R.-Borisoglebsky U. Yaroslav. gub., Cherepovets u. Novg. lips.). In some cases, internal remedies are also used: it is given, for example, to drink crushed crystal with water (Orl. lips. and u.)."

But there were also more extravagant means.

"Especially fantastic and absurd," Popov wrote, "are the means directed against diseases that are difficult to treat. Urinary incontinence, for example, as if it should be treated with such means: burn the skin of a magpie and drink ashes with water, drink dried hare blood and eat hare meat. In case of falling, it is necessary to cut out a young hare from a pregnant hare in March, burn it and take the ashes in a decoction of cherry leaves. With a hernia, it is good to attach warm rat meat to it, and if the hernia is in small children, then you should cut out the testicles from the cat and, hanging it in a cloth to the belt, tie it so that the sewn testicles fall over the pubis (Karachevsky u. Orl. lip., Cherepovets u. Novg. lips.)".

In addition to unusual means, the most ordinary ones were also used, literally lying underfoot in every peasant's yard:

"Droppings are used in the form of ointments and poultices for various diseases of the throat. Sometimes in such cases, simply heated cow feces is applied to the neck, sometimes pigeon feces mixed with honey, and sometimes pig feces melted with cow oil. The same application finds droppings in the form of poultices on the cheek with flux or toothache. In these cases, either heated manure is applied – the one that flies away from under the hooves when the horse is running, or warm horse droppings are applied. Some go further and put dog or cow droppings even on a sick tooth and lubricate the gums with them (Volkhovsky and Orlovsky u. Orl. lips.). Cases are transmitted by various employees, where, for example, only the legs are buried in the manure or the whole patient is covered with manure. The latter is sometimes done with fever (Varnavinsky u. Bonfire, lips.) and is considered very useful for cholera (Kaluga. lips. and u.). "manure baths" also deserve attention. Here is how one of the Oryol employees describes the method of preparing such baths, in case of a cold: "A large tub is put on the floor in the hut, oat chaff, horse droppings, salt are poured there, sometimes a horse doctor also gives some medicine. Then they boil water, pour it into a tub and cover it with a spindle so that it all steams. When the water cools down a little, the patient is put in a tub, covered with a spindle, retinues, etc., leaving one head uncovered, and kept so for 3-4 hours. Taking out of the tub, the patient is put on the stove and covered with sackcloth, so as not to cool down, and given to drink a glass of vodka infused with pods." Similarly, a manure bath for children is prepared in the Orel province. The manure is put in a tub and poured with boiling water. When the water cools down a little, they put the child and cover him with a retinue with his head. Often this causes children to suffocate and they are taken out of the tub dead, but the reason, according to the employee, is blamed on evil spirits... But the use of urine and feces is not limited only to their external use, and in some cases, contrary to all human feelings, they are also used inside. With bruises, they drink children's urine (Poshekhonsky u. Yaroslav. lips.), and when drunkenness and the inseparable violence of drunkards are fed with their chicken droppings and female urine (Krasnoslobodsky u. Penza. lips.), intoxicated to insensibility, juice from horse manure is squeezed into the mouth (Vyatsk., Kaluga. and Eagle. lips.)".

Drunkenness, as indicated in the same work, was also fought with the help of corpses:

"In some cases, the water collected after the ablution of several deceased also acquires healing value: this water is in the Zhizdrinsky district (Kaluga Province). they give patients with a variety of diseases to drink, especially it helps from binge drinking."

"The drunk was boiled to death"

No less interesting observation of doctors and ethnographers turned out to be that the methods of folk healing, leading to sad outcomes, like manure baths for children, did not stop their mass use.

"A great fuss and commotion," Popov wrote, "is always caused in the village by cases when someone "gets drunk" or drowns. In these cases, a large, noisy crowd of people usually gathers at the scene of the incident, there is no end to advice and suggestions, the patient, like a toy, passes from hand to hand and the whole series of those rude techniques that have been developed by long-term village practice is done over him. The most important techniques used in such cases to bring patients to their senses, it seems, specifically of Russian origin, are barrel riding and pumping. The latter is made on matting, armyaks, blankets, etc. or on the hands. The last type of pumping is performed in such a way that the patient is held by the hands and feet, face down, and then thrown high up, then lowered down. Auxiliary techniques are also used: they tickle the patient with anything in the nose, beat on the heels, pour hot water on his head, etc. Especially gets in such cases "drunk". Pouring boiling water on the head and other parts of the body is sometimes done in these cases with such zeal that second-degree burns are obtained, the patient then gets out his hair and he acquires a scarred bald spot all over his head. One of the employees even cites a case when a drunk was boiled to death by pouring several samovars of boiling water on him."

But something else turned out to be even more striking. No methods of combating such methods of treatment, even in cases with a fatal outcome, have been used. Dr. Rudinsky, for example, wrote that he had never been able to bring to justice a single healer who killed a patient. The healer immediately went into hiding, and the police sympathizing with him, as a rule, did not take any investigative actions, despite the presence of a provision on punishments for healers in the code of punishments.

Then the doctors began to hope that the healers would disappear naturally due to the widespread spread of syphilis. The disease did not succumb to any conspiracies, and the zemstvo doctors noted a slight decrease in the number of practicing healers. However, then folk healers found a way out of the situation. As the zemstvo doctor Eduard Zalensky wrote in 1908, the healers got used to sending messengers to him for anti-syphilitic drugs, which they gave to the patients, creating their usual witchcraft entourage.

Healers flourished in the first years of Soviet power, and any agitation against them had no special effect on either grandparents or their patients. And only after the introduction of severe penalties for illegal medical activity, as well as after the number of hospitals and paramedic stations increased, it seemed that quackery disappeared forever. However, even in those days, if there was a need, any woman could find her way to a grandmother who removed the damage or was able to enchant.

And at the end of the 1980s, faith in non-traditional, as they began to be called, methods of treatment flourished with unprecedented force. A myriad of hereditary healers and healers appeared, whose methods practically did not differ from the pre-revolutionary ones. And this outbreak could hardly be explained by the poverty of the people or their total illiteracy. Most likely, the sharp drop in the level of domestic health care that occurred in those years was affected. But back in 1869, a prominent Russian doctor Ivan Pantyukhov wrote about the struggle of doctors with healers: "If people are not very willing to turn to doctors, then they probably do not see any special benefit from them for themselves." And no matter what age is in the yard, everyone is treated with what they believe in more, no matter how fantastic and ridiculous these methods may look.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru12.07.2010