Birth of St. Mary (St. Anne's parturition) in the light of messages from medical education: three examples from Croatian sacral heritage.

Christian tradition treats birth in several characteristic motives. The most frequent is the Birth of Jesus Christ, while much rarer is the apocryphal motive of the birth of St. Mary. By analyzing three paintings from Croatian 16-17th-century sacral-art heritage, depicting the parturition of St. Anne (St. Mary's Mother), the authors of this paper are trying to define the role of ethnomedical notions in the formation of modern medical and general culture.