Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Milli Folklor, cilt.12, sa.91, ss.150-156, 2011 (SCI-Expanded)
In this paper, there is a general evaluation covering the religious and magical practices of the folk medicine which is a part of folk culture. A part from the applications considering religion and magic is discussed with a comparative view by giving examples from various native societies. In this study, the applications of religion and medicine related field of folk medicine that is classified in various forms in written sources are explained by mentioning examples from Anatolia. It is important to emphasize that the earlier research studies have important contributions in the means of understanding the origins of folk medicine. From this point, various applications which have been the basic sources for folk medicine are compared with the examples of ethnographic researches that conducted with native societies; the practices that are evaluated in the means of religion and magic are discussed in the basis of "magico-religious approach". Article starts with the comparison of folk medicine and modern medicine concepts; in the rest of the article, a general analysis of the treatment practices in the field of religion and magic is conducted by depending on the claim that in the ongoing period from diagnosis to treatment they are perceived as the reason of the illnesses and as being the source of folk medicine. The health applications that continued from the native societies to today's approaches and which are named as "folk medicine" are related with supernatural fundamentally. Although there are differences among cultures, the field of traditional folk medicine is functional in the treatment of the illnesses at the basis of "magic" and "religion".