Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/78

66 sick, and must have been the main source of the art and science of medicine. He notes that the ancient priests, bound as they were to traditional methods, to the explanation of divine interference and to obedience to divine commands, still undoubtedly profited by experience, their organization issued in schools of medicine, cures were recorded—not merely after the fashion of votive tablets but records of the remedies and diet found useful in particular cases—and many of the priest-physicians became emment throughout the Greco-Roman world. Their practice gradually broadened and was laicized, though the sacred tradition still attached to many plants, and, in Egypt at least, had the force of law, so that if the physician did not succeed in saving a patient by the means prescribed in the sacred books he was declared innocent and without reproach, while if he acted in defiance of the sacred precepts he was liable to be accused and condemned to death. The author's ultimate conclusion is that, from the beginning of the art, remedies have been chosen and administered in consequence of hypothetic reasoning or preconceived theories, and that it is impossible to hope for progress without recurring to principles, either expressed or implied. Invention, intuition and reason are convertible terms. Contrary to M. Lévy-Bruhl's opinion, there is no prelogical mentality. What may be called the instinctive reason is a reason which has not yet learned to criticize itself, or hardly so; but it is still reason. It is a precritical reason, but not an alogical reason.

There are many hints in M. Nourry's book which students will be glad to take; and they are expressed in his limpid and elegant French. As a study of the origins of medicine, however, it might be usefully extended. A more detailed and elaborate consideration of the three chief magical theories of disease would show that they are not successive stages, but are dependent on the views of the magico-religious organization of the world, severally held by different "primitive" peoples; and a closer investigation of their causes and of the results that flow from each of them in the views of life and death entertained would probably lead to the clearing up of many unsolved problems in the processes of treatment, not to mention those