Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/29

Rh down to the present day. To save himself from malign powers primitive man revenged himself upon his neighbours, or propitiated the spirits by wheedling and coaxing. He practised incantations to please them, or drove them away by loud noises and other means. The genealogy of many eminent medical and surgical methods today leads back to this strange and quaint ancestry. Thus the practice of massage arose from pummelling and pounding the patient's body to drive out the evil spirit. In trephining, the malign spirit was to escape through the hole in the skull. Baths began by the plunging of the patient into hot or cold water, or sweating him, with the same purpose of driving out the demon of sickness. Counter-irritants came from efforts to burn out the spirit by fire, hot instruments, and blistering appliances. Purgatives and emetics aimed at expelling him through the orifices of the body; deodorants were to drive him away by strong odours. Horrible medicines were to nauseate or kill the demon. This superstition even dominated the materia medica of certain periods in the Middle Ages, when the most loathsome and incredible drugs, composed of vile insects, excrement, and other unpleasant things, were administered to the sick, and it undoubtedly lingers today in the popular fancy