Obraz choroby w listach do TVP. Próba rekonstrukcji myślenia potocznego
Clinical picture of disease in letters to polish television (TVP). A reconstruction of popular thinking

Summary/Abstract: The article seeks to characterize and interpret the “Kashpirovsky phenomenon”, which was part of the context of the first stage of the system transformation (1990–1993).The extent of the popularity of this healer and his ‘health sessions’ was a kind of challenge to medical sociologists (the ‘teletherapy’ was watched by 59% of adult Poles). The text shows changes in the picture of typical civilization diseases taking place against the backdrop of rapid, deep and radical social changes bringing with them a number of severely felt stressors at the time. It also describes the method used to analyze two collections of personal documents/letters/addressed to TVP (Polish Television) by viewers of Kashpirovsky’s programs; in the first stage there 1907 documents of this type, and 1311 in the second. The obtained results made it possible to discern the types and effects of somatic and psychosomatic changes described by the viewers (positive or negative), to register the types of diseases (ailments) that viewers expected to be cured, to interpret popular, commonsense knowledge about health and disease, inter alia: ‘lay etiological concepts’, ‘presumed causal relationships’ between their own illness and Kashpirovsky’s methods, and to describe thaumaturgic phenomena caused, in the opinion of the authors of the letters, by the healer, etc.

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