who discovered our medicines?—anthropology can assist us to answer the question.—the priest and the medicine-man originally one.—disease the work of magic.—origin of our ideas of the soul and future life.—disease-demons.
cardinal newman, in his sermon on “the world’s benefactors,” asks, “who was the first cultivator of corn? who first tamed and domesticated the animals whose strength we use, and whom we make our food? or who first discovered the medicinal herbs, which from the earliest times have been our resource against disease? if it was mortal man who thus looked through the vegetable and animal worlds, and discriminated between the useful and the worthless, his name is unknown to the millions whom he has thus benefited.
“it is notorious that those who first suggest the most happy inventions and open a way to the secret stores of nature; those who weary themselves in the search after truth; strike out momentous principles of action; painfully force upon their contemporaries the adoption of beneficial measures; or, again, are the original cause of the chief events in national history,—are commonly supplanted, as regards celebrity and reward, by inferior men. their works are not called after them, nor the arts and systems which they have given the world. their schools are usurped by strangers, and their maxims of wisdom circulate among the children of their people, forming perhaps a nation’s character, but not embalming in their own immortality the names of their original authors.”
the reflection is an old one; the son of sirach said, “and some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them. but these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten” (ecclesiasticus xliv. 9, 10). cardinal newman has framed his question, so far as the healing art is concerned, in a manner to which it is impossible to make a satisfactory answer. no one man first discovered the medicinal herbs; probably the discovery of all the virtues of a single one of them was not the work of any individual. no man8 “looked through the vegetable and animal worlds and discriminated between the useful and the worthless”; all this has been the work of ages, and is the outcome of the experience of thousands of investigators. the medical arts have played so important a part in the development of our civilization, that they constitute a branch of study second to none in utility and interest to those who would know something of the work of the world’s benefactors. probably at no period in the world’s history have medical men occupied a more honourable or a more prominent position than they do at the present time, and it would almost seem that the rewards which an ignorant or ungrateful civilization denied in the past to medical men are now being bestowed on those who in these latter days have been so fortunate as to inherit the traditions and the acquirements of a forgotten ancestry of truth-seekers and students of the mysteries of nature. as the earliest races of mankind passed by slow degrees from a state of savagery to the primitive civilizations, we must seek for the beginnings of the medical arts in the representatives of the ancient barbarisms which are to be found to-day in the aborigines of central africa and the islands of australasian seas. the intimate connection which exists between the magician, the sorcerer, and the “medicine man” of the present day serves to illustrate how the priest, the magician, and the physician of the past were so frequently combined in a single individual, and to explain how the mysteries of religion were so generally connected with those of medicine.
professor tylor has explained how death and all forms of disease were attributed to magic, the essence of which is the belief in the influence of the spirits of dead men. this belief is termed animism, and mr. tylor says: “animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high culture. animism is the groundwork of the philosophy of religion, from that of the savages up to that of civilized men; but although it may at first seem to afford but a meagre and bare definition of a minimum of religion, it will be found practically sufficient; for where the roots are, the branches will generally be produced. the theory of animism divides into two great dogmas, forming parts of one consistent doctrine: first, concerning souls of individual creatures, capable of continued existence after death; second, concerning other spirits, upward to the rank of powerful deities. spiritual beings are held to affect or control the events of the material world, and man’s life here and hereafter; and it being considered that they hold intercourse with men and receive pleasure or displeasure from human actions, the belief in their existence leads naturally, sooner or later, to active reverence and propitiation.” there is no doubt that the belief in the9 soul and in the existence of the spirits of the departed in another world arose from dreams. when the savage in his sleep held converse, as it seemed to him, with the actual forms of his departed relatives and friends, the most natural thing imaginable would be the belief that these persons actually existed in a spiritual shape in some other world than the material one in which he existed. those who dreamed most frequently and most vividly, and were able to describe their visions most clearly, would naturally strive to interpret their meaning, and would become, to their grosser and less poetical brethren, more important personages, and be considered as in closer converse with the spiritual world than themselves. thus, in process of time, the seer, the prophet, and the magician would be evolved.
how did primitive man come by his ideas? when he saw the effects of a power, he could only make guesses at the cause; he could only speak of it by some such terms as he would use concerning a human agent. he saw the effects of fire, and personified the cause. with the hindus agni was the giver of light and warmth, and so of the life of plants, of animals, and of men; and so with thunder, lightning, and storm, primitive man looked upon these phenomena as the conflicts of beings higher and more powerful than himself. thus it was that the ancient people of india formed their conceptions of the storm-gods, the maruts, i.e. the smashers. amongst the esthonians, as max müller tells us,15 prayers were addressed to thunder and rain as late as the seventeenth century. “dear thunder, push elsewhere all the thick black clouds. holy thunder, guard our seed-field.” (this same thunder-god, perkuna, says max müller, was the god parganya, who was invoked in india a thousand years before alexander’s expedition.) we say it rains, it thunders. primitive folk said the rain-god poured out his buckets, the thunder-god was angry.
what did primitive man think when he observed the germination of seeds; the chick coming out of the egg; the butterfly bursting from the chrysalis; the shadow which everywhere accompanies the man; the shadows of the tree; the leaves which vibrate in the breeze; when he heard the roaring of the wind; the moaning of the storm, and the strange, mysterious echo which, plainly as he heard it, ceased as he approached the mountain-side which he conceived to be its home? he could but believe that all nature was living, like himself; and that, as he could not understand what he saw in the seed, the egg, the chrysalis, or the shadow, so all nature was full of mystery, of a life that he in vain would try to comprehend. many savages regard their own shadows as one of their two souls,—a soul which is always watching10 their actions, and ready to bear witness against them. how should it be otherwise with them? the shadow is a reality to the savage, and so is the echo. the ship which visits his shores, the watch and the compass, which he sees for the first time, are alive; they move, they must be living!
mr. tylor, in his chapter on animism, in his primitive culture, says (vol. ii. pp. 124, 125):—
“as in normal conditions the man’s soul, inhabiting his body, is held to give it life, to think, speak, and act through it, so an adaptation of the self-same principle explains abnormal conditions of body or mind, by considering the new symptoms as due to the operation of a second soul-like being, a strange spirit. the possessed man, tossed and shaken in fever, pained and wrenched as though some live creature were tearing or twisting him within, pining as though it were devouring his vitals day by day, rationally finds a personal spiritual cause for his sufferings. in hideous dreams he may even sometimes see the very ghost or nightmare-fiend that plagues him. especially when the mysterious, unseen power throws him helpless to the ground, jerks and writhes him in convulsions, makes him leap upon the bystanders with a giant’s strength and a wild beast’s ferocity, impels him, with distorted face and frantic gesture, and voice not his own, nor seemingly even human, to pour forth wild incoherent raving, or with thought and eloquence beyond his sober faculties, to command, to counsel, to foretell—such a one seems to those who watch him, and even to himself, to have become the mere instrument of a spirit which has seized him or entered into him—a possessing demon in whose personality the patient believes so implicitly that he often imagines a personal name for it, which it can declare when it speaks in its own voice and character through his organs of speech; at last, quitting the medium’s spent and jaded body, the intruding spirit departs as it came. this is the savage theory of demoniacal possession and obsession, which has been for ages, and still remains, the dominant theory of disease and inspiration among the lower races. it is obviously based on an animistic interpretation, most genuine and rational in its proper place in man’s intellectual history, of the natural symptoms of the cases. the general doctrine of disease-spirits and oracle-spirits appears to have its earliest, broadest, and most consistent position within the limits of savagery. when we have gained a clear idea of it in this its original home, we shall be able to trace it along from grade to grade of civilization, breaking away piecemeal under the influence of new medical theories, yet sometimes expanding in revival, and, at least, in lingering survival holding its place into the midst of our modern life. the possession-theory is not merely11 known to us by the statements of those who describe diseases in accordance with it. disease being accounted for by attacks of spirits, it naturally follows that to get rid of these spirits is the proper means of cure. thus the practices of the exorcist appear side by side with the doctrine of possession, from its first appearance in savagery to its survival in modern civilization; and nothing could display more vividly the conception of a disease or a mental affliction as caused by a personal spiritual being than the proceedings of the exorcist who talks to it, coaxes or threatens it, makes offerings to it, entices or drives it out of the patient’s body, and induces it to take up its abode in some other.”
