Образованите лекари срещу неуките баби: българският дебат за народната медицина от края на XIX и началото на XX век
The Educated Medical Men vs. Ignorant Grannies: The Debate on Bulgarian Folk Medicine (Late 19th to Early 20th Century)

Summary/Abstract: Tracing the debates on the folk healers in the Bulgarian medical press, the article explores the reorganization of the local healthcare market in the decades after the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878 and the establishment of Bulgarian state with the Treaty of San-Stefano (3 March 1878). The paper focuses on the complex discursive field – sanitary laws, ethnographic works, journalistic programmes, out of which emerged the opposition between the medical men’s project for new publicity of expert knowledge and the “ignorant grannies” reality of ignorance, superstitions and resistant archetypes of health care. The analysis of the physicians’ criticism of indigenous healing practices leads to the conclusion that the specific institutional agenda of the newly created national state presupposes construction of unstable professional identity by mixing occupational regulations with populist patterns and scientific utopias for total demythologization of the pre-modern therapeutic conceptions.

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