Feldshers and Healers

Abstract

This chapter talks about feldshers and healers. Feldshers were the group most devoted to offering medical aid, and occupied a position somewhere on the borderline between official and folk medicine. It was they to whom one went with broken bones, sprains, dislocations, and other mechanical injuries. They were also considered the experts in taking the pulse, bloodletting, applying leeches, performing dry and wet cupping, applying iodine to the throat, pulling teeth, and giving enemas. Some feldshers had completed nursing training in community institutions such as homeless shelters or public baths. Most feldshers based their treatment on traditional views of anatomy, attributing illness to 'bad blood.' By the 1900s, feldshers had begun to bring elements of biomedicine into Jewish folk medicine. In the second half of the nineteenth century, women educated in midwifery schools gained the recognition of the rabbinic authorities. They were cited in the responsa as specialists, the more so since the scope of their competencies went far beyond assisting at births and they were practically comparable in their functions to feldshers. The Jewish populace preferred the assistance offered by feldshers, wise women, and midwives from within their own community. There was a fairly large group of practitioners who worked outside the parameters of the law and the regulations of state bodies. The scope of their activities may be defined as healing, even quackery, though not all of them drew on magic and they were not all known as quacks.