Re: KLEZMER IN THE WEDDING

[ROBERT A ROTHSTEIN <rar...>]

To continue the discussion of _feldsher_:
        In Tsarist Russia (and later) the Russian word _feldsher_ (from
German _Feldscher_, a shortening of _Feldscherer_ 'field [of battle]
cutter [i.e., surgeon]) referred to a military physician/surgeon without
the kind of training that a fully qualified doctor would have.  Just as
the profession of "physician's assistant" seems to have grown out of the
experience of medical corpsmen in the US armed forces, so too the _feldsher_
became a civilian "health provider" (to use the currently fashionable term)
without full medical training.  I don't know how old the term is in Yiddish,
but I suspect that it came into Yiddish from Russian rather than directly
from German.  It also exists in Polish in the form _felczer_.
                Bob Rothstein

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