Physicians as Collectors of Folk Medicine Records in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the End of the 19th and in the Early 20th Century
Physicians as Collectors of Folk Medicine Records in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the End of the 19th and in the Early 20th Century

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses the phenomena of collecting of folk medicine materials by physicians who worked in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These first physicians – ethnographers, along with their regular services in medical institutions, also begin collecting and recording data related to the folk’s forms of treatment of different diseases, popular beliefs about the causes of disease and ways of protecting. Their observations are published in the Glasniku Zemaljskog Muzeja u Bosni i Hercegovini (Journal of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina). While on the one hand enthusiastically collecting data and material relics, thus endeavouring to preserve this part of the national culture, on the other hand, as representatives of the official medical system, challenge the value of the folk’s treatment methods and want to replace them with, as they stated, more rational methods of official medicine. The paper focuses on the two periods of operation of the aforementioned physicians, one during the Austrian administration and the other during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Both periods are characterized by the interest of the physicians to the folk medicine, but also by their popular public education work, especially at the time of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, in order to replace local folk healers with the medical professions and institutions who will be the only responsible for the issues of diagnosis and treatment of illness.

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