Paper short abstract:

Baltic manors provided treatment for the sick peasants, gave them medicines and summoned a doctor if needed. What did the serfs think about the treatments that they were subjected to? Were there any commonalities in the peasants' and their masters' views regarding health and diseases?

Paper long abstract:

A rather popular idea in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Baltic manors was paternalism, according to which the relationship between the landlord and his serfs was analogous to that between a father and his children. In paternalistic literature, one of the most recurrent pieces of evidence of such fatherly care provided by manor owners was their role in mediating medical care to the serfs. Manors provided treatment for the sick peasants, gave them medicines and summoned a doctor if needed. Not only acting as healthcare providers for the serfs, manors clearly proceeded from the principle of paternalism, regarding the serfs as children who did not know what was good and beneficial to them.

Marten Seppel has studied what historical sources from manors tell us about the healthcare of peasantry. In these fascinating and informative sources, however, the voice of peasants themselves is not heard. What did the serfs think about the treatments that they were subjected to? Was it a pleasant or a horrible experience? Were there any commonalities in the peasants' and their masters' views regarding health and diseases? Folklore sources reveal the ambiguity in how this fatherly care could have been perceived by the serfs. While peasants learned about treatments and received medicines from the manor, they also suspected that people living at the manor spread diseases. Furthermore, various methods of treatment known in Western medicine were interpreted as dark magic.