Folk Medicine and Socio-Cultural Contexts Affecting it in the Safavid Era

Folk medicine in the Safavid period was influenced by several epistemological, cultural and social contexts. On the one hand, the long-lasting established historical, intellectual and cultural traits established the status of the Iranian society of the Safavid era as a pre-modern society. On the other hand, the occurrence of some political, social and cultural changes in this period influenced the cultural situation, the system of beliefs, worldviews, norms and actions of the social classes in the context of everyday life. These two major components directly and indirectly affected the state of folk medicine in this period. It is hypothesized that the folk medicine of the Safavid period is affected by some factors, such as the mythic nature of the society, reliance on pre-modern cosmology, the predominance of foreign sciences and approaches based on astrology, the spread of superstition and also the structural state of science. Using an analytical approach, the author tries to explain which of the epistemological, cultural and social factors highly affected the folk medicine in the Safavid era?