Abstract: In order to become relevant in a given culture, the imported phenomena (e.g. medicinal plants) have to be integrated into own, while also remaining ‘foreign’ in some respect (which, in the case of medicinal plants, gives additional potency to their healing power). The paper takes as examples two imported species of herbs introduced into Estonian ethnomedicine before the 19th century: arnica and camomile. Camomile was already described as a medicinal plant in the first medicinal magazine in Estonian (in 1776), whereas arnica emerged in the p...
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