Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/393

Rh of mankind, consciously or unconsciously, personify disease or think of it as something foreign to the body, some definite or mysterious thing intrusive. From the painted red man of the plains, who associated his bodily ailments with demons, spirits of the dead, witchcraft, magic, evil possession, and angry gods, and hopes to banish these with shrieks and songs, it is indeed a far cry to the clean, clad, business or professional white man of the town, who more or less sheepishly confesses that he carries a horse-chestnut or a potato in his pocket to ward off rheumatism. But between the charm of the horse-chestnut and the chant of the savage lies a great body of ignorance and superstition, upon which quacks flourish mightily, and which can not be altogether ignored in any wide outlook to-day over the field of medical science and medical art.

In fact, the superstitious red man is much more reasonable and logical in his procedures for the cure of disease, considering the scope and character of his conceptions of its nature and the phase of civilization which he represents, than are large numbers of considerably evolved white folks who, in the midst of highly civilized and cultured communities, bow still at the altars of sanitary savagery, cherish a devotion to drugs almost pathetic, and utterly fail to grasp the significance of the new conceptions of disease which at last have made of medicine an exact science.

That which has especially contributed to the establishment of medicine on a firm and rational basis is the gradual centering of our thought and experiment upon definite and tangible structural features of the body, and the conviction that the physical nature of man is closely interlinked with that of lower forms of life.

In its primitive phases, medicine brought gods and men into close relationship and led constantly to religious conceptions. It was, in fact, not a science, but a religion. The early priests were physicians, the primal gods were gods of healing, and their temples were hospitals. As time passed, absorbing speculations, fantastic often, frequently grotesque, about the structure of the body and the nature of disease, won general belief and disappeared. Theories, systems, and schools came and went. Now mysticism and magic, now humors and philosophy, held sway. Quackeries and frauds flourished for their little hour, and vanished, as they always must. Finally, the body itself became the object of direct study, and the mysteries began to clear.

But it was a long time after it became reputable and legal to study the anatomy of the human body before the old physicians acquired a definite conception of it as an admirably grouped assemblage of tissues and organs. It took much longer for the development of accurate notions as to the functions and uses of