Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/30

14 that, to be efficacious, medicine must be "strong" and bad tasting.

From the primitive fear of evil spirits as causing illness descended especially that dark ignorance which has been so terribly shown in the treatment of the insane. It is still hardly a century and a half since the insane were treated as possessed of devils, to be subdued by cruelty, chains, darkness, and terror. While this form of superstition was not universal, it broke out again and again up to the seventeenth century.

Through incantations and exorcisms the "medicine-man" developed—he who dealt with mysteries, and so the rudiments of theoretic medicine appeared in the priest-physician. The germ of practical clinical medicine may be traced to that instinctive craving, keen among animals and even yet found in healthy human beings, which prompts the use of the correct natural remedy in a given case. This instinct may have been far stronger in primitive man than it is now, and probably led him in the first place to a knowledge of plants and herbs. Such knowledge, handed down with later traditions of brewing and boiling, constituted the early materia medica, and it enhanced the wisdom of the medicine-man, and the usefulness of the