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Hello, I'm a new kid on the block and delighted to be here. Could someone please give me some suggestions as to which Fairy Tales illustrate the good and bad characteristics of healers/medicine men/ doctors etc? I'm hoping to find a good story to illustrate these things to trainee doctors.
Best wishes, LizzieGates
Lord Aragorn uses medicine in the curing of the fallen that still live in Return of the King.
Well, I don't suppose the cutting open of the wolf's belly in Little Red Riding Hood would count as surgery, would it?
Snow white, the poisened apple.
Sleeping beauty, the prick (injection?) that knocked her out, and the mouth to mouth that revived her.
Alice in wonderland, her experimentation with hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Chukotka fairy-tales sometimes feature some kind of shaman who overpower/overwit ogres, and steal people's souls back from them, thus healing them.
(which might not always be a good thing - I once read a Chukotka fairy tale which told how a powerful shaman stole another shamans sons soul from the Birdwoman who lived in another plane, brought the boy back to life and the last damn paragraph is something like this:
"Be careful with him. I had to put some of my own power in him, but there is evil in him." And then the flew away.
When the son grew up, he became a powerful evil shaman who destroyed all the people in the neighbourhood)
I also think that shamanistic cultures might feature quite a lot of fairy-tales where the shaman is the hero.
A wicked doctor helps to poison the king in "The Princess and Curdie" by George Macdonald.