«These creeping things are believed to get into a human body»: the stories about snakes in medical studies in the late 19th — early 20th century

This article is concerned with the ethnoscientific texts of the late 19th — early 20th century which tell about snakes and their settlement in a human body. The mythological approach reveals essentials features of such texts. There may be several causes of the disease. First there is a real symptomatology, secondly the disease is believed to be an animal embodiment of a spirit, and finally it is a real amphibian that lives in a human body.