Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/29

 bloodletting probably first came to be adopted as a remedial measure:—

Let us suppose that in the earliest period of man's history somebody experienced the need of the medical art. He may, for example, have felt a general sense of heaviness in his body (plethora), associated perhaps with redness of the eyes, and he probably did not know what he should do in order to obtain relief from these sensations. Then, when his trouble was at its worst, his nose began to bleed, and the bleeding continued until he experienced decided relief from his discomfort. In this way he learned an important fact, and cherished it in his memory.

On a later occasion he experienced once more the same sense of heaviness, and he lost no time in scratching the interior of his nose in order to provoke a return of the bleeding. The nose-*bleed thus excited again gave him entire relief from the unpleasant sensations, and upon the first convenient occasion he told his children and all his relatives about the successful results obtained from this curative procedure. Little by little this simple act, which was a first step in the healing art, developed into the intelligently and skilfully performed operation of venesection.

Primitive man also increased his stock of knowledge in the healing art by reading attentively the book of nature,—i.e., by observing how animals, when ill, eat the leaves or stems of certain plants and thus obtain relief from their disorders. The virtues of a species of origanum, as an antidote for poisoning from the bite of a snake, were revealed, it is asserted, by the observation that turtles, when bitten by one of these reptiles, immediately seek for the plant in question and, after feeding upon it, experience no perceptible ill effects from the poisonous bite. The natives of India ascribe the discovery of the remarkable virtues of snakeroot (the bitter root of the ophiorrhiza Mungos) as an antidote for poisoning by the bite of a snake, to the ichneumon, a small animal of the rat species. The instinctive desire to escape pain taught man, as it does the lower animals, to keep a fractured limb at rest, thus giving the separated ends of the bone an opportunity to reunite; after which the limb eventually becomes as strong as it ever was. Simple as this mode of acquiring useful medical