Soviet medicine and alternative medical practices in the Buryat-Mongolian ASSR and Mongolian People's Republic in the 1920s-1930s

This article shines a spotlight on the relations between Soviet medicine, a type of state healthcare heavily influenced by both Bolshevik ideology and the pre-revolutionary Russian medicine and traditional medicine in Buryat-Mongolia and Mongolia. The authors point out three approaches to the treatment of the lama healers and shamans developed by the Soviets: the official governmental one; the scientific approach developed by the Buryat Scientific Committee, and the medical one expressed by the Burnarkomzdrav. The article traces the way of Tibetan medicine, which was gradually prohibited in Buryat-Mongolia comparing it with the similar process in the Mongolian People’s Republic. The conclusion is that despite a much higher degree of opposition between Mongolian-Tibetan medicine and Soviet medicine in Mongolia, the result in both republics was the same - the almost total elimination of the lamas as a social class and long oblivion for the Tibetan medicine in general.