"barbarous" beliefs - the traditional practice not only of aborigines. It is characteristic of the cultural horizon of our rich and civilized peace and it is very close to us in the time: even at the end OF THE XIX century and in Italy, and in Victorian England was disseminated steadfast "people prejudice", if we use ourselves the language of doctors and contemporary observers, what rape of virgin or is still better - unripe girl it is possible to lead to the recovery from syphillis and the gonorrhea. Speech does not go on the irregular, single cases. There are numerous facts, described in notes and works of the doctors of that time. One of them, for example, in the medical recommendations, published in 1887, with the indignation writes that, first of all in the villages, people "solidly believe: as soon as you will reveal that it infected itself by French disease, it is necessary to complete rough report with the virgin or the girl ".
The sense of this belief consisted in the fact that the flesh of victim fulfills the function of the "sponge, capable of absorbing into itself everything". For those believed in this the defloration of girl was the same how for us are the therapeutic methods of treatment. Ignorance generated idea, that the recovery from the disease will be hundred per-cent with the aid of this means and that "the sick organism will sanitate once and for all".
And not only. On different court trials in the matters about the rape and attempt at the rape those accused in the attack on the girls were frequently justified by the fact that this for the purpose of recovery from gonorrhea or syphillis made. The Viennese folklorist Of friderik Krauss composed the collection of people erotic traditions, which consisted of several monographs, dedicated to the individual countries, including Italy ("sexual life in the beliefs, the customs and the people Italian traditions"). To Raphael korso, Italian ethnographer, who collaborated with Krauss, reported that "idea about the fact that gonorrhea and syphillis they can cure with the aid of the defloration of virgin or friction of sick penis against vaginu of virgin, it is connected with the tradition of magic nature, at basis of which belief, that the dirtiness disappears with the contact with the clean and uncontaminated flesh".
In actuality this belief became the result of the powerful stratification of information and ideas about the disease, pererabotannykh by the complex of the connection of people and scientific medicine. The concept of the "migration" of disease has old origin, it was reflected already in the medical treatises OF THE XVI century, in other words, on first - terrible - stage of the epidemic of syphillis, carried from the news-writer, probably, by the crews of Christopher Columbus. To the highest degree infectious, which was extended among the amateurs of merry life it is municipal the epoch of revival, this illness led to the appearance of an enormous quantity of publications and hygienic orders, in which was contained the innumerable number of councils how to avoid the "shafts of Venus" or as to cure. The faith in the possibility of recovery through the sexual report with the virgin was connected with the belief, which assigned therapeutic properties to contact in with warm vnutrennostyami of the recently killed animal: rabbit, pigeon, deer - the treatment, accessible for the rich, it understands. Poor it was necessary to be satisfied by frogs.
The completely not refuted, this idea traversed never centuries and was preserved in THE XIX and even in THE XX century: when the epidemic of syphillis broke out after World War II and withdrawal of forces from South Africa, large popularity enjoyed the method of "treatment by virgins". And here is step from syphillis toward AIDS: diseases change, but remain ineradicable the roots of concepts, beliefs and medical methods, after which it is actually difficult to examine the prospect for future mezhkul'turnogo public health.
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