Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/181

Rh creed. And we are shown how, consequently, there yet remains a place for priestly action in medical treatment.

Let me add a more remarkable mode in which the primitive theory has persisted. The notion that the demon who was causing a disease must be driven out, continued, until recent times, to give a character to medical practice, and even now influences the conceptions which many people form of medicines. The primitive medicine-man, thinking to make the body an intolerable habitat for the demon, exposed his patient to this or that kind of alarming, painful, or disgusting treatment. He made before him dreadful noises and fearful grimaces, or subjected him to an almost unbearable heat, or produced under his nose atrocious stenches, or made him swallow the most abominable substances he could think of. As we saw in the case cited from Ecclesiasticus, the idea, even among the semi-civilized Hebrews, long remained of this nature. Now there is abundant proof that, not only during mediæval days but in far more recent days, the efficiency of medicines was associated in thought with their disgustingness: the more repulsive they were the more effectual. Hence Montaigne's ridicule of the monstrous compounds used by doctors in his day—"dung of elephant, the left foot of a tortoise, liver of a mole, powdered excrement of rats, etc." Hence a receipt given in Vicarie's Treasure of Anatomy (1641)—"Five spoonfuls of knave child urine of an innocent." Hence "the beliefs that epilepsy may be cured by drinking water out of the skull of a suicide or by tasting the blood of a murderer;" that "moss growing on a human skull, if dried, powdered, and taken as snuff, will cure the headache;" and that the halter and chips from the gibbet on which malefactors have been executed or exposed have medicinal properties. And there prevails in our own days among the uncultured and the young a similarly-derived notion. They betray an ingrained mental association between the nastiness of a medicine and its efficiency: so much so, indeed, that a medicine which is pleasant is with difficulty believed to be a medicine.

As with evolution at large, as with organic evolution, and as with social evolution throughout its other divisions, secondary differentiations accompany the primary differentiation. While the medical agency separates from the ecclesiastical agency, there go on separations within the medical agency itself.

The most pronounced division is that between physicians and surgeons. The origin of this has been confused in various ways, and seems now the more obscure because there has been of late arising not a further distinction between the two but a fusion of them. All along they have had a common function in the treatment of ordinary disorders and in the uses of drugs; and the