Wien Klin Wochenschr. 1991 ; 103(16): 481-3.

[Ethnomedicine--history of medicine. Sciences of medical thinking and behavior of man]

Prinz A.

Institut für Geschichte der Medizin, Universität Wien.

Ethnomedicine and the history of medicine have in common the description of medical systems, whereby the separation is geographical in the former case and historical in the latter case. As experts in both fields are not at the same time practitioners of these medical systems, they depend on source material. The interpretation of these sources is largely subordinated to the subjective personal structure of the scientist on the one hand, and is closely related to epistemiological problems, coloured by the spirit of the times, on the other hand. Above all, many medical historians even today fall victim to an unjustified cultural evolutionism, according to which ethnomedical research work in the field of "primitive medicine" may be employed to reconstruct a fictive paleopathology. The cooperation which is nowadays established between ethnomedicine and the history of medicine concerns the common structures of medical systems in their social and cultural context--so-called pattern--with the aim of establishing a theory of medical thinking and behaviour of man.