Zielnik Zioła lecznicze... Michała Fedorowskiego jako dokumentacja badań etnograficznych

Abstrakt

The work entitled: Medicinal herbs and herbs used in witchcraft by Lithuanians living near Volkowysk and Słonim is a manuscript accompanied by dried plant specimens. The author, Polish ethnographer Michal Fedorowski (vel Federowski, 1853-1923), documented 19th century folk medicine in the territory of present day Belarus.

The first two volumes of this work are dated 1882-1883 and were found in the herbarium of the Faculty of Biology, University of Warsaw in 2012. This article includes: the content of two volumes of Medicinal herbs... as a source document, photos of the dried plant specimens attached to the manuscripts, a description of the herbaria and their history, a description of the conservation which was conducted in 2015, and our research paper.

These two volumes by Fedorowski include 108 herbarium specimens. Thanks to this it was possible to identify the plant species described by Fedorowski, even when he used folk names. The scientific names identified from Medicinal herbs... were compared with the scientific names included in the first volume of Fedorowski’s monograph on Lithuanian Rus. A hypothesis was formulated explaining the differences which resulted from this comparison