Историческото развитие на народната медицина и нейна та връзка и взаимодействие с научната медицина
The Historical Development of Folk Medicine and Its Connection and Interaction with Scientific Medicine

Summary/Abstract: An attempt is made in this article to study the connection and interaction of folk medicine with the scientific one on a general historical plane — from the appearance of the first scientific medical system of Hippocrates to our own day. The question of the genesis of scientific medicine is considered in the light of the Marxist conception of the appearance of the first germs of empirical knowledge in connection with material production-social practice. The author has made use of the works and conclusions, the methods and principles of a number of world-known historians of medicine, ethnography and culture in which the connection and interaction of the empirical knowledge of folk healers is reflected, to a greater or lesser degree, on the one hand, and scientific medical knowledge which developed at increasingly accelerated rates from the scientific knowledge of Antiquity up until the present day on the other hand. The author also marks the different proportion of the share of folk medicine, scientifically-experimentally and theoretically adopted and put to use in the systems of the scientifically trained doctors, clinicists and pharmacists by studying the sources of ancient Indian, ancient Chinese, Gra-eco-Roman, Byzantine, mediaeval, including the mediaeval Byzantine and, of course, the capitalist and socialist world. The general conclusion is that folk creativity in the sphere of medicine and its interaction on scientific medicine should be thoroughly studied on the basis and with the aid of the most recent methods, scientific conclusions and approaches, principled foundations put forward by present day theoretical natural history, ethnography, history of science and the entire science of society and philosophy, in general the whole of our knowledge of society, ethnography and the history of culture.

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