A POPULAR HISTORY OF MEDICINE.
CHAPTER I.
PRIMITIVE MAN A SAVAGE.
The Medicine and Surgery of the Lower Animals.—Poisons and Animals.—Observation amongst Savages.—Man in the Glacial Period.
There is abundant proof from natural history that the lower animals submit to medical and surgical treatment, and subject themselves in their necessities to appropriate treatment. Not only do they treat themselves when injured or ill, but they assist each other. Dogs and cats use various natural medicines, chiefly emetics and purgatives, in the shape of grasses and other plants. The fibrous-rooted wheat-grass, Triticum caninum, sometimes called dog’s-wheat, is eaten medicinally by dogs. Probably other species, such as Agrostis caninia, brown bent-grass, are used in like manner.3
Mr. George Jesse describes another kind of “dog-grass,” Cynosurus cristatus, as a natural medicine, both emetic and purgative, which is resorted to by the canine species when suffering from indigestion and other disorders of the stomach. Every druggist’s apprentice knows how remarkably fond cats are of valerian root (Valeriana officinalis). This strong-smelling root acts on these animals as an intoxicant, and they roll over and over the plant with the wildest delight when brought into contact with it. Cats are extravagantly fond of cat-mint (Nepeta cataria). It has a powerful odour, like that of pennyroyal. There is no evidence, however, that these plants have any medicinal properties for which they are used by cats, they are merely enjoyed by them on account of their perfume.
Dr. W. Lauder Lindsay, in his Mind in the Lower Animals, says that the Indian mongoose, poisoned by the snake which it attacks, uses the antidote to be found in the Mimosa octandra.4
“Its value both as a cure and as a preventive is said to be well known to it. Whenever in its battles with serpents it receives a wound, it at once retreats, goes in search of the antidote, and having found and devoured it, returns to the charge, and generally carries the day, seeming none the worse for its bite.”5 This, however, is probably a fable of the Hindus.
“A toad, bit or stung by a spider, repeatedly betook itself to a plant of Plantago major (the Greater Plantain), and ate a portion of its leaf, but died after repeated bites of the spider, when the plant had been experimentally removed by man.”6
The medicinal uses of the hellebore were anciently believed to have been discovered by the goat.
“Virgil reports of dittany,” says More, in his Antidote to Atheism, “that the wild goats eat it when they are shot with darts.” The ancients said that the art of bleeding was first taught by the hippopotamus, which thrusts itself against a sharp-pointed reed in the river banks, when it thinks it needs phlebotomy.
If man had not yet learned the medicinal properties of salt, he could discover them by the greedy licking of it by buffaloes, horses, and camels. “On the Mongolian camels,” says Prejevalsky, “salt, in whatever form, acts as an aperient, especially if they have been long without it.” Rats will submit to the gnawing off of a leg when caught in a trap, so that they may escape capture (Jesse). Livingstone says that the chimpanzee, soko, or other anthropoid apes will staunch bleeding wounds by means of their fingers, or of leaves, turf, or grass stuffed into them. Animals treat wounds by licking—a very effectual if tedious method of fomentation or poulticing.
Cornelius Agrippa, in his first book of Occult Philosophy, says that we have learned the use of many remedies from the animals. “The sick magpie puts a bay-leaf into her nest and is recovered. The lion, if he be feverish, is recovered by the eating of an ape. By eating the herb dittany, a wounded stag expels the dart out of its body. Cranes medicine themselves with bulrushes, leopards with wolf’s-bane, boars with ivy; for between such plants and animals there is an occult friendship.”7
Some interesting observations relating to the surgical treatment of wounds by birds were recently brought by M. Fatio before the Physical Society of Geneva. He quotes the case of the snipe, which he has often observed engaged in repairing damages. With its beak and feathers it makes a very creditable dressing, applying plasters to bleeding wounds, and even securing a broken limb by means of a stout ligature. On one occasion he killed a snipe which had on the chest a large dressing composed of down taken from other parts of the body, and securely fixed to the wound by the coagulated blood. Twice he has brought home snipe with interwoven feathers strapped on to the site of fracture of one or other limb. The most interesting example was that of a snipe, both of whose legs he had unfortunately broken by a misdirected shot. He recovered the animal only the day following, and he then found that the poor bird had contrived to apply dressings and a sort of splint to both limbs. In carrying out this operation, some feathers had become entangled around the beak, and, not being able to use its claws to get rid of them, it was almost dead from hunger when discovered. In a case recorded by M. Magnin, a snipe, which was observed to fly away with a broken leg, was subsequently found to have forced the fragments into a parallel position, the upper fragment reaching to the knee, and secured them there by means of a strong band of feathers and moss intermingled. The observers were particularly struck by the application of a ligature of a kind of flat-leafed grass wound round the limb in a spiral form, and fixed by means of a sort of glue.
Le Clerc thought that the stories of animals teaching men the use of plants, herbs, etc., meant that men tried them first upon animals before using them for food or medicine. There is no probability of this having been so. If men had observed with LinnÆus that horses eat aconite with impunity, and had in consequence eaten it themselves, the result would have been fatal. Birds and herbivorous animals eat belladonna with impunity,8 and it has very little effect on horses and donkeys. Goats, sheep, and horses are said by Dr. Ringer to eat hemlock without ill effects, yet it poisoned Socrates. Henbane has little or no effect on sheep, cows, and pigs. Ipecacuanha does not cause vomiting in rabbits,9 and so on.
Probably from the earliest times man would be led to observe the behaviour of animals when suffering from disease or injury. If he could not learn much from them in the way of medicine, they could teach him many useful arts. In savage man we must seek the beginnings of our civilization, and it is in the lowest tribes and those which have not yet felt the influences of superior races that we must search for the most primitive forms of medical ideas and the earliest theories and treatment of disease.
Sir John Lubbock says:10 “It is a common opinion that savages are, as a general rule, only the miserable remnants of nations once more civilized; but although there are some well-established cases of natural decay, there is no scientific evidence which would justify us in asserting that this applies to savages in general.”
Dr. E.B. Tylor, in his fascinating work on Primitive Culture, says:11 “The thesis which I venture to sustain, within limits, is simply this—that the savage state in some measure represents an early condition of mankind, out of which the higher culture has gradually been developed or evolved by processes still in regular operation as of old, the result showing that, on the whole, progress has far prevailed over relapse. On this proposition the main tendency of human society during its long term of existence has been to pass from a savage to a civilized state. It is mere matter of chronicle that modern civilization is a development of mediÆval civilization, which again is a development from civilization of the order represented in Greece, Assyria, or Egypt. Then the higher culture being clearly traced back to what may be called the middle culture, the question which remains is, whether this middle culture may be traced back to the lower culture, that is, to savagery.”
Providing we can find our savage pure and uncontaminated, it matters little where we seek him; north, south, east, or west, he will be practically the same for our purpose.
Dr. Robertson says: “If we suppose two tribes, though placed in the most remote regions of the globe, to live in a climate nearly of the same temperature, to be in the same state of society, and to resemble each other in the degree of their improvement, they must feel the same wants, and exert the same endeavours to supply them.... In every part of the earth the progress of man has been nearly the same, and we can trace him in his career from the rude simplicity of savage life, until he attains the industry, the arts, and the elegance of polished society.”12
Writing of the primitive folk, the Eastern Inoits, Elie Reclus tells us that,13 “shut away from the rest of the world by their barriers of ice, the Esquimaux, more than any other people, have remained outside foreign influences, outside the civilization whose contact shatters and transforms. They have been readily perceived by prehistoric science to offer an intermediate type between man as he is and man as he was in bygone ages. When first visited, they were in the very midst of the stone and bone epoch,14 just as were the Guanches when they were discovered; their iron and steel are recent, almost contemporary importations. The lives of Europeans of the Glacial period cannot have been very different from those led amongst their snow-fields by the Inoits of to-day.”
CHAPTER II.
ANIMISM.
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 man “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 the 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 watching 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 merely 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.”
CHAPTER III.
SAVAGE THEORIES OF DISEASE.
Demoniacal.—Witchcraft.—Offended Dead Persons.
We find amongst savages three chief theories of disease; that it is caused by—
I. The anger of an offended demon.
II. Witchcraft, or
III. Offended dead persons.
I. Anger of Offended Demons.
Disease and death are set down to the influences of spirits in the Australian-Tasmanian district, where demons are held to have the power of creeping into men’s bodies, to eat up their livers, and sometimes to work the wicked will of a sorcerer by inflicting blows with a club on the back of the victim’s neck.16 The Mantira, a low race of the Malay Peninsula, believe in the theory of disease-spirits in its extreme form; their spirits cause all sorts of ailments. The “Hantu Kalumbahan” causes small-pox; the “Hantu Kamang” brings on inflammation and swelling of the hands and feet; the blood which flows from wounds is due to the “Hantu-pari,” which fastens on the wound and sucks. So many diseases, so many Hantus. If a new malady were to appear amongst the tribes, a new Hantu would be named as its cause.17 When small-pox breaks out amongst these people, they place thorns and brush in the paths to keep the demons away. The Khonds of Orissa try to defend themselves against the goddess of small-pox, Jugah Pensu, in the same way. Among the Dayaks of Borneo, to have been ill is to have been smitten by a spirit; invisible spirits inflict invisible wounds with invisible spears, or they enter bodies and make them mad. Disease-spirits in the Indian Archipelago are conciliated by presents and dances. In Polynesia, every sickness is set down to deities which have been offended, or which have been urged to afflict the sufferer by their enemies.18 In New Zealand disease is supposed to be due to a baby, or undeveloped spirit, which is gnawing the patient’s body. Those who endeavour to charm it away persuade it to get upon a flax-stalk and go home. Each part of the body is the particular region of the spirit whose office it is to afflict it.19
The Prairie Indians treat all diseases in the same way, as they must all have been caused by one evil spirit.20
Among the Betschvaria disease may be averted if a painted stone or a crossbar smeared with medicine be set up near the entrance of the residence or approach to a town.21
Amongst the Bodo and Dhimal peoples, when the exorcist is called to a sick man he sets thirteen loaves round him, to represent the gods, one of whom he must have offended; then he prays to the deity, holding a pendulum by a string. The offended god is supposed to cause the pendulum to swing towards his loaf.22
The New Zealanders had a separate demon for each part of the body to cause disease. Tonga caused headache and sickness; Moko-Tiki was responsible for chest pains, and so on.23
The Karens of Burmah and the Zulus both say, “The rainbow is disease. If it rests on a man, something will happen to him.”24 “The rainbow has come to drink wells.” They say, “Look out; some one or other will come violently by an evil death.”
The Tasmanians lay their sick round a corpse on the funeral pile, that the dead may come in the night and take out the devils that cause the diseases.25
The Zulus believe that spirits, when angry, seize a living man’s body and inflict disease and death, and when kindly disposed give health and cattle. In Madagascar, Mr. Tylor tells us, the spirits of the Vazimbas, the aborigines of the island, inflict diseases, and the Malagasy accounts for all sorts of mysterious complaints by the supposition that he has given offence to some Vazimba. The Gold Coast negroes believe that ghosts plague the living and cause sickness. The Dayaks of Borneo think that the souls of men enter the trunks of trees, and the Hindus hold that plants are sometimes the homes of the spirits of the departed. The Santals of Bengal believe that the spirits of the good enter into fruit-bearing trees.26 It is but another step to the belief that beneficent medicinal plants are tenanted by good spirits, and poisonous plants by evil spirits. The Malays have a special demon for each kind of disease; one for small-pox, another for swellings, and so on.27
The Dayaks of Borneo acknowledge a supreme God, although, as we have said, they attribute all kinds of diseases and calamities to the malignity of evil spirits. Their system of medicine consists in the application of appropriate charms or the offering of conciliatory sacrifices.28 Yet they are an intelligent and highly capable race, and their steel instruments far surpass European wares in strength and fineness of edge.29
The Javanese, nominally Mahometans, are really believers in the primitive animism of their ancestry. They worship numberless spirits; all their villages have patron saints, to whom is attributed all that happens to the inhabitants, good or bad. Mentik causes the rice disease; Sawan produces convulsions in children; Dengen causes gout and rheumatism.30
The religion of Siam is a corrupted Buddhism; spirits and demons (nats or phees) are worshipped and propitiated. Some of these malignant beings cause children to sicken and die. Talismans are worked into the ornamentation of the houses to avert their evil influence.31
The Rev. J.L. Wilson32 says: “Demoniacal possessions are common, and the feats performed by those who are supposed to be under such influence are certainly not unlike those described in the New Testament. Frantic gestures, convulsions, foaming at the mouth, feats of supernatural strength, furious ravings, bodily lacerations, grinding of teeth, and other things of a similar character, may be witnessed in most of the cases.”
In Finnish mythology, which introduces us to ideas of extreme antiquity, we find the disease-demon theory in all its force.
The Tietajat, “the learned,” and the Noijat, or sorcerers, claimed the power to cure diseases by expelling the demons which caused them, by incantations assisted by drugs; these magicians were the only physicians of the nation. The Tietajat and the Noijat, however, were not magicians of the same class: the former practised “white magic,” or “sacred science”; the latter practised “black magic,” or sorcery. Evil spirits, poisons, and malice were the chief aids to practice in the latter; while Tietajat, by means of learning and the assistance of benevolent supernatural beings, devote themselves to the welfare of the people. The three highest deities of Finnish mythology, Ukko, WÄinÄmÖinen, and Ilmarinen, corresponded to three superior gods of the Accadian magic collection, Ana, Hea, and Mut-ge. WÄinÄmÖinen was the great spirit of life, the master of favourable spells, conqueror of evil, and sovereign possessor of science. The sweat which dropped from his body was a balm for all diseases. It was he alone who could conquer all the demons. Every disease was itself a demon. The invasion of the disorder was an actual possession. Finnish magic was chiefly medical, being used to cure diseases and wounds.33 The Finns believed diseases to be the daughters of Louhiatar, the demon of diseases. Pleurisy, gout, colic, consumption, leprosy, and the plague were all distinct personages. By the help of conjurations, these might be buried or cooked in a brazen vessel. When the priest made his diagnosis he had to be in a state of divine ecstasy, and then by incantation, assisted by drugs, he proceeded to exorcise the demon. The Finnish incantations belonged to the same family as those of the Accadians. Professor Lenormant translates from the great Epopee of the Kalevala one of the incantations:—
“O malady, disappear into the heavens; pain, rise up to the clouds; inflamed vapour, fly into the air, in order that the wind may take thee away, that the tempest may chase thee to distant regions, where neither sun nor moon give their light, where the warm wind does not inflame the flesh.
“O pain, mount upon the winged steed of stone, and fly to the mountains covered with iron. For he is too robust to be devoured by disease, to be consumed by pains.
“Go, O diseases, to where the virgin of pains has her hearth, where the daughter of WÄinÄmÖinen cooks pains,—go to the hill of pains.
“These are the white dogs, who formerly hurled torments, who groaned in their sufferings.”
Another incantation against the plague was discovered by Ganander, and is given by Lenormant:—
“O scourge, depart; plague, take thy flight, far from the bare flesh.
“I will give thee a horse, with which to escape, whose shoes shall not slide on ice;” and so on.
The Jewish ceremony expelled the scapegoat to the desert; the Accadian banished the disease-demons to the desert of sand; the Finnish magician sent his disease-demons to Lapland.
The goddess Suonetar was the healer and renewer of flesh:—
“She is beautiful, the goddess of veins, Suonetar, the beneficent goddess! She knits the veins wonderfully with her beautiful spindle, her metal distaff, her iron wheel.
“Come to me, I invoke thy help; come to me, I call thee. Bring in thy bosom a bundle of flesh, a ball of veins to tie the extremity of the veins.”34
“All diseases are attributed by the Thibetans to the four elements, who are propitiated accordingly in cases of severe illness. The winds are invoked in cases of affections of the breathing; fire in fevers and inflammations; water in dropsy, and diseases whereby the fluids are affected; and the god of earth when solid organs are diseased, as in liver complaints, rheumatism, etc. Propitiatory offerings are made to the deities of these elements, but never sacrifices.”35
Hooker tells of a case of apoplexy which was treated by a Lama, who perched a saddle on a stone, and burning incense before it, scattered rice to the winds, invoking the various mountain peaks in the neighbourhood.
In Hottentot mythology Gaunab is a malevolent ghost, who kills people who die what we call a “natural” death. Unburied men change into this sort of vampire.36
The demoniacal theory of at least one class of disease is found in the Bible, although the New Testament in one passage distinguishes between lunatics and demoniacs. In Matthew iv. 24 we read that they brought to Jesus “those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick.” Epilepsy is evidently the disease described in Mark ix. 17-26, though the symptoms are attributed to possession by a dumb spirit.
II. Witchcraft as a Cause of Disease.
Sorcerers and magicians not only use evil words and cast evil glances at the persons whom they wish to afflict, but they endeavour to obtain possession of some article which has belonged to the individual, or something connected more closely with his personality, as parings of the nails or a few of his hairs, and through these he professes to be able to operate more effectually on the object of his malice. It is to this use of portions of the body that ignorant persons, even at the present day, insist that nail-parings, hair-cuttings, and the like, shall be at once destroyed by fire. Such superstitions are found at work all over the world. Mr. Black tells us37 that the servants of the chiefs of the South Sea Islanders carefully collect and bury their masters’ spittle in places where sorcerers are not likely to find it. He says also it is believed in the West of Scotland that if a bird used any of the hair of a person’s head in building his nest, the individual would be subject to headaches and become bald. Of course the bird is held to be the embodiment of an evil spirit or witch. Images of persons to be bewitched are sometimes made in wood or wax, in which has been inserted some of the hair of the victim of the enchantment; the image is then buried, and before long some malady attacks the part of the bewitched person corresponding to that in which the hair has been placed in his effigy. Disease-making is a profession in the island of Tanna in the New Hebrides; the sorcerers collect the skins and shells of the fruits eaten by any one who is to be punished, they are then slowly burned, and the victims sicken. Disease-demons are driven away from patients in Alaska by the beating of drums. The size of the drum and the force of the beating are directly proportioned to the gravity of the disease. A headache can be dispelled by the gentle tapping of a toy drum; concussion of the brain would require that the big drum should be thumped till it broke; if that failed to expel the evil spirit, there would be nothing left but to strangle the patient.
The wild natives of Australia are exceedingly superstitious. Sorcery enters into every relation of life, and their great fear is lest they should be injured by the mysterious influence called boyl-ya. The sorcerers have power to enter the bodies of men and slowly consume them; the victim feels the pain as the boyl-ya enters him, and it does not leave him till it is extracted by another sorcerer. While he is sleeping, he may be attacked and bewitched by having pointed at him a leg-bone of a kangaroo, or the sorcerer may steal away his kidney-fat, where the savage believes that his power resides, or he may secretly slay his victim by a blow on the back of his neck. The magician may dispose of his victim by procuring a lock of his hair and roasting it with fat; as it is consumed, so does his victim pine away and die.
Wingo is a superstition which some Australian tribes have, that with a rope of fibre they can partially choke a man, by putting it round his neck at night while he is asleep, without waking him; his enemy then removes his caul-fat from under his short rib, leaving no mark or wound. When the victim awakes he feels no pain or weakness, but sooner or later he feels something break in his inside like a string. He then goes home and dies at once.38
Dr. Watson thus describes the typical medicine-men:—
“The Tla-guill-augh, or man of supernatural gifts, is supposed to be capable of throwing his good or bad medicine, without regard to distance, on whom he will, and to kill or cure by magic at his pleasure. These medicine-men are generally beyond the meridian of life; grave, sedate, and shy, with a certain air of cunning, but possessing some skill in the use of herbs and roots, and in the management of injuries and external diseases. The people at large stand in great awe of them, and consult them on every affair of importance.”39
Dr. O.L. MÖller, Medical Director-General of the Danish army, describes a certain wise woman near LÖgstÖr, who used in her prescriptions for the sick people who consulted her a charm of willow twigs tied together amongst other mystic things, and whose therapeutics were of a bloodthirsty character, as she would advise her patients to strike the first person they met after returning home, until they drew blood, for that person would be the cause of the disease.40
The fact that ghosts and demons are everywhere believed to cause diseases, and that sorcery is practised more or less by most of the races of man in connection with the causation or cure of disease, has been used as a factor in the argument for the origin of primitive man from a single pair in accordance with the orthodox belief. Dr. Pickering, the ethnologist, says: “Superstitions also appear to be subject to the same laws of progression with communicated knowledge, and the belief in ghosts, evil spirits, and sorcery, current among the ruder East Indian tribes, in Madagascar, and in a great part of Africa, seems to indicate that such ideas may have elsewhere preceded a regular form of mythology.”41
There has long been practised in the West Indies a species of witchcraft called Obeah or Obi, supposed to have been introduced from Africa, and which is in reality an ingenious system of poisoning. Mr. Bowrey, Government chemist in Jamaica, connects Obeah-poisoning with a plant which grows abundantly in Jamaica and other West Indian islands, called the “savannah flower,” or “yellow-flowered nightshade” (Urechites suberecta).42
Mr. Bowrey concludes that there is some truth in the stories told of the poisoning by Obeah-men, and that minute doses, frequently administered, might cause death without suspicion being aroused. The British Medical Journal, June 18th, 1892, has the following interesting notes on Obeah (p. 1296):—
“It is difficult to obtain detailed information regarding Obeah practices. They rest largely on the credence given to superstitious practices and vulgar quackery by the uneducated in every country, but there seems little doubt that among them secret poisoning is included. Benjamin Moseley (Medical Tracts, London, 1800) states that Obi had its origin, like many customs among the Africans, from the ancient Egyptians, Ob meaning a demon or magic. Villiers-Stuart (Jamaica Revisited, 1891) says that Obeah in the West African dialects signifies serpent, and that the Obeah-men in Jamaica carry (but in greatest secrecy, for fear of the penal laws) a stick on which is carved a serpent, the emblem being a relic of the serpent worship once universal among mankind, and also that they sacrifice cocks at their religious rites. Moseley gives the following account: ‘Obi, for the purposes of bewitching people or consuming them by lingering illness, is made of grave-dirt, hair, teeth of sharks and other animals, blood, feathers,’ and so on. Mixtures of these are placed in various ways near the person to be bewitched. ‘The victims to this nefarious art in the West Indies among the negroes are numerous. No humanity of the master nor skill in medicine can relieve the poor negro labouring under the influence of Obi. He will surely die, and of a disease that answers no description in nosology. This, when I first went to the colonies, perplexed me. Laws have been made in the West Indies to punish the Obian practice with death, but they have been impotent and nugatory. Laws constructed in the West Indies can never suppress the effect of ideas, the origin of which is in the centre of Africa.’ ‘A negro Obi-man will administer a baleful dose from poisonous herbs, and calculate its mortal effects to an hour, day, week, month, or year.’ The missionaries Waddell (Twenty-nine Years in the West Indies and Central Africa, 1863) and Blyth (Reminiscences of Missionary Life, 1851) confirm this account. They are all agreed that similar practices prevail in West and Central Africa, and that Jamaican Obeah-men use poisons. Mr. Bowrey informs me that he has examined many Obeah charms, and confirms Moseley’s account of them. He thinks, however, that among the negroes the knowledge of poisons has been rapidly dying out, ‘doctor’s medicine’ and the much-advertised patent medicines having largely replaced the drugs of the native practitioners. The belief in Obeah is still, however, almost universal among the black population. According to Sir Spencer St. John (Hayti, or the Black Republic, second edition, London, 1889) secret poisoning is a lucrative occupation in the neighbouring island of Hayti, certain of the people having an intimate knowledge of indigenous poisonous plants and being expert poisoners.”
III. Offence to the Dead as a Cause of Disease.
How comes it that all the races of man of which we have any accurate information have some belief or other in spirits good or bad, and of some other life than the actual one which they live in their waking hours? The theologian answers it in his own way, the anthropologist in his, and perhaps a simpler one. With the religious aspect of the question we are not here concerned, we have merely to consider the scientific points involved. When the most ignorant savage of the lowest type falls asleep, he is as sure to dream as his more favoured civilized brother. To his companions he appears as though he were dead, he is motionless and apparently unconscious. He awakes and is himself again. What has his spirit or thinking part been doing while his body slept? The man has seen various things and places, has even conversed with friend or foe in his slumbers, has engaged in fights, has taken a journey, has had adventures, and yet his body has not stirred. Naturally enough the explanation most satisfactory is, that his soul has temporarily left his body, and has met other souls in a similar condition. He has seen and conversed with his dead friends or relatives, has been comforted by their presence or alarmed at the visitation. Here, then, we have the anthropologist’s “theory of souls where life, mind, breath, shadow, reflexion, dream, vision, come together and account for one another in some such vague, confused way as satisfies the untaught reasoner.”43
But the savage goes further than this: he has seen his horse, his dog, his canoe, and his spear in his dream, they too must have souls; and thus he invests with a spiritual essence every material object by which he is surrounded. And so we find funeral sacrifices and ceremonies all over the world which testify to this universal belief of primitive man. The ornaments and weapons which are found with the bones of chiefs, the warrior’s horses slain at his burial place, the food and drink and piece of money left with the dead, are intelligible on this theory, and on no other. The savage’s idea of a demon or evil spirit is usually that of a soul of a malevolent dead man. The man was his enemy during life, he remains his enemy after death; or he owed some acknowledgment and reward to a spirit who had helped him, he has neglected to pay his debt, and he has offended the spirit in consequence. In cases of fainting, delirium from fever, hysteria, epilepsy, or insanity, the savage sees the partial absence of the patient’s soul from his body, or the work of a tormenting demon. Demoniacal possession and the ceremonies of exorcism are theories readily explainable by facts with which the anthropologist is familiar. “The sick Australian will believe that the angry ghost of a dead man has got into him, and is gnawing his liver; in a Patagonian skin hut the wizards may be seen dancing, shouting, and drumming, to drive out the evil demon from a man down with fever.”44
When Prof. Bartram, the anthropologist, was in Burma, his servant was seized with an apopleptic fit. The man’s wife, of course, attributed the misfortune to an angry demon, so she set out for him little heaps of rice, and was heard praying, “Oh, ride him not! Ah, let him go! Grip him not so hard! Thou shalt have rice! Ah, how good that tastes!”
The exorcist may so delude himself that he may believe that he has power to make the demon converse with him. There may be a falsetto voice like that of the mediums of modern civilization issuing from the patient’s mouth, and the exorcist’s questions and commands may be answered, and the evil spirit may consent to leave the sufferer in peace. In nervous or mental disorders, in cases of defective power of assimilating food, such a process may exert a soothing and highly beneficial influence on the patient who is actively co-operating by his faith in his own cure, and so the error both as to the cause of the malady and its treatment is perpetuated.
Primitive folk think that life is indestructible; what is called death is but a change of condition to them; even mites and mosquitos are immortal.45
The Tasmanian, when he suffers from a gnawing disease, believes that he has unwittingly pronounced the name of a dead man, who, thus summoned, has crept into his body, and is consuming his liver. The sick Zulu believes that some dead ancestor he sees in a dream has caused his ailment, wanting to be propitiated with the sacrifice of an ox. The Samoan thinks that the ancestral souls can get into the heads and stomachs of living men, and cause their illness and death. These are examples of human ghosts having become demons.46
In the Samoan group people thought that if a man died bearing ill-will towards any one, he would be likely to return to trouble him, and cause sickness and death, taking up his abode in the sufferer’s head, chest, or stomach. If he died suddenly, they said he had been eaten by the spirit that took him. In the Georgian and Society Islands evil demons cause convulsions and hysterics, or twist the bowels till the sufferers die writhing in agony. Madmen are thought to be entered by a god, so they are treated with great respect; idiots are considered to be divinely inspired.47 Many other races believe in the inspiration of mentally feeble or insane persons. Amongst the Dacotas spirits of animals, trees, stones, or deceased persons are believed to enter the patient and cause his disease. The medicine-man recites charms over him, and making a symbolic representation of the intruding spirit in bark, shoots it ceremonially; he sucks over the seat of the pain to draw the spirit out, and fires guns at it as it escapes.
This is just what happened in the West Indies in the time of Columbus. Friar Roman Paul tells of a native sorcerer who pretended to pull the disease from the legs of his patients, blowing it away, and telling it to begone to the mountain or the sea. He would then pretend to extract by sucking some stone or bit of flesh, which he declared had been put into the patient to cause the disease by a deity in punishment for some religious neglect.48 The Patagonians believed that sickness was caused by spirits entering the patient’s body; they considered that an evil demon held possession of the sick man’s body, and their doctors always carried a drum which they struck at the bedside to frighten away the demons which caused the disorder.49 The Zulus and Basutos in Africa teach that ghosts of dead persons are the causes of all diseases. Congo tribes believe also that the souls of the dead cause disease and death amongst men.
The art of medicine in these lands therefore is, for the most part, merely an affair of propitiating some offended and disease-causing spirit. In several parts of Africa mentally deranged persons are worshipped. Madness and idiocy are explained by the phrase, “he has fiends.” The Bodo and Dhimal people of North-east India ascribe all diseases to a deity who torments the patient, and who must be appeased by the sacrifice of a hog. With these people naturally the doctor is a sort of priest. As Mr. Tylor says, “Where the world-wide doctrine of disease-demons has held sway, men’s minds, full of spells and ceremonies, have scarce had room for thought of drugs and regimen.”50
A forest tribe of the Malay Peninsula, called the Original People, are said to have no religion, no idea of any Supreme Being, and no priests; yet their Puyung, who is a sort of general adviser to the tribe, instructs them in sorcery and the doctrine of ghosts and evil spirits. In sickness they use the roots and leaves of trees as medicines. Amongst the Tarawan group of the Coral Islands, Pickering says: “Divination or sorcery was also known, and the natives paid worship to the manes or spirits of their departed ancestors.”51 Probably on careful investigation we should find that in these cases the doctrine of ghosts and the worship of spirits has some connection with the causation of disease.
The Malagasy profess a religion which is chiefly fetishism. They believe in the life of the spirit, which they call “the essential part of me,” apart from the body; and they believe that this spirit exists when the body dies. Such “ghosts” they consider can do harm in various ways, especially by causing diseases; consequently they endeavour, as the chief means of cure, to appease the offended ghost. Witchcraft and belief in charms naturally flourish amongst these people.52
Mr. A.W. Howitt says that the Kurnai of Gippsland, Australia, believe that a man’s spirit (Yambo) can leave the body during sleep, and hold converse with other disembodied spirits. Another tribe, the Woi-worung, call this spirit Murup, and they suppose it leaves the body in a similar manner, the exact moment of its departure being indicated by the “snoring” of the sleeper. As a theory of the soul, Mr. Howitt says: “It may be said of the aborigines I am now concerned with, and probably of all others, that their dreams are to them as much realities in one sense, as are the actual events of their waking life. It may be said that in this respect they fail to distinguish between the subjective and objective impressions of the brain, and regard both as real events.”53
They believe that these ghosts live upon plants, that they can revisit their old haunts at will, and communicate with the wizards or medicine-men on being summoned by them. A celebrated wizard amongst the Woi-worung caught the spirit of a dying man, and brought it back under his ’possum rug, and restored it to the still breathing body just in time to save his life. The ghosts can kill game with spiritually poisoned spears. Even the tomahawk has a spirit, and this belief explains many burial customs. One of the Woi-worung people told Mr. Howitt that they buried the weapon with the dead man, “so that he might have it handy.” Other tribes bury with the corpse the amulets and charms used by the deceased during life, in case they may be required in the spirit-world. The Woi-worung believe that their wizards could send their deadly magical yark, or rock crystal, against a person they desired to kill, in the form of a small whirlwind. They believe that their wizards “go up” at night to the sky, and obtain such information as they require in their profession. They can also bring away the magical apparatus by which some one of another tribe might be injuring the health of a member of his own tribe. It is highly probable that in these Australian beliefs we have the counterparts of those which were everywhere held by primitive man. Good spirits are very little worshipped by savages; they are already well disposed, and need no invocation; it is the bad ones who must be propitiated by an infinite variety of rites and sacrifices. “Thus,” as Professor Keane says, “has demonology everywhere preceded theology.”54
Mr. Edward Palmer, in Notes on Some Australian Tribes, says that the Gulf tribes believe in spirits which live inside the bark of trees, and which come out at night to hold intercourse with the doctors, or “mediums.” These spirits work evil at times. The Kombinegherry tribe are much afraid of an evil-working spirit called Tharragarry, but they are protected by a good spirit, Coomboorah. The Mycoolon people believe in an invisible spear which enters the body, leaving no outward sign of its entry. The victim does not even know that he is hurt; he goes on hunting, and returns home as usual; in the night he becomes ill, delirious, or mad, and dies in the morning. Thimmool is a pointed leg-bone of a man, which, being held over a blackfellow when asleep, causes sickness or death. The Marro is the pinion-bone of a hawk, in which hair of an enemy has been fixed with wax. To work a charm on him a fire circle is made round it. With this charm they can make their enemy sick, or, by prolonging their magic, kill him. When they think they have done harm enough, they place the Marro in water, which removes the charm.55
Mr. H.H. Johnstone says that the tribes on the Lower Congo bury with any one of consequence bales of cloth, plates, beads, knives, and other things required to set the deceased up in the spirit-life on which he has entered. The plates are broken, the beads are crushed, and the knives bent, so as to kill them, that they too may “die,” and go to the spirit-land with their owner.56
This is a valuable confirmation of the doctrine of animism.
As Mr. Herbert Spencer says:57 “It is absurd to suppose that uncivilized man possesses at the outset the idea of ‘natural explanation.’” At a great price has civilized man purchased the power of giving a natural explanation to the phenomena by which he is surrounded. As societies grow, as the arts flourish, as painfully, little by little, his experiences accumulate, so does man learn to correct his earlier impressions, and to construct the foundations of science. It is the natural, or it would not be the universal, process for primitive man to explain phenomena by the simplest methods, and these always lead him to his superstitions. It is the only process open to him. The activity which he sees all around him is controlled by the spirits of the dead, and by spirits more or less like those which animate his fellow-men.
Clement of Alexandria says that all superstition arises from the inveterate habit of mankind to make gods like themselves. The deities have like passions with their worshippers, “and some say that plagues, and hailstorms, and tempests, and the like, are wont to take place, not alone in consequence of material disturbance, but also through the anger of demons and bad angels. These can only be appeased by sacrifice and incantations. Yet some of them are easily satisfied, for when animals failed, it sufficed for the magi at Cleone to bleed their own fingers.”58
“The prophetess Diotima, by the Athenians offering sacrifice previous to the pestilence, effected a delay of the plague for ten years.”59
CHAPTER IV.
MAGIC AND SORCERY IN THE TREATMENT OF DISEASE.
These originated partly in the Desire to cover Ignorance.—Medicine-men.—Sucking out Diseases.—Origin of Exorcism.—Ingenuity of the Priests.—Blowing Disease away.—Beelzebub cast out by Beelzebub.—Menders of Souls.—”Bringing up the Devil.“—Diseases and Medicines.—Fever Puppets.—Amulets.—Totemism and Medicine.
Dr. Robertson tells us that the ignorant pretenders to medical skill amongst the North American Indians were compelled to cover their ignorance concerning the structure of the human body, and the causes of its diseases, by imputing the origin of the maladies which they failed to cure to supernatural influences of a baleful sort. They therefore “prescribed or performed a variety of mysterious rites, which they gave out to be of such efficacy as to remove the most dangerous and inveterate malice. The credulity and love of the marvellous natural to uninformed men favoured the deception, and prepared them to be the dupes of those impostors. Among savages, their first physicians are a kind of conjurers, or wizards, who boast that they know what is past, and can foretell what is to come. Thus, superstition, in its earliest form, flowed from the solicitude of man to be delivered from present distress, not from his dread of evils awaiting him in a future life, and was originally ingrafted on medicine, not on religion. One of the first and most intelligent historians of America was struck with this alliance between the art of divination and that of physic among the people of Hispaniola. But this was not peculiar to them. The Alexis, the Piayas, the Autmoins, or whatever was the distinguishing name of the diviners and charmers in other parts of America, were all physicians of their respective tribes, in the same manner as the Buhitos of Hispaniola. As their function led them to apply to the human mind when enfeebled by sickness, and as they found it, in that season of dejection, prone to be alarmed with imaginary fears, or assured with vain hopes, they easily induced it to rely with implicit confidence on the virtue of their spells and the certainty of their predictions.”60
The aborigines of the Amazon have a kind of priests called PagÉs, like the medicine-men of the North American Indians. They attribute all diseases either to poison or to the charms of some enemy. Of course, diseases caused by magic can only be cured by magic, so these powerful priest-physicians cure their patients by strong blowing and breathing upon them, accompanied by the singing of songs and by incantations. They are believed to have the power to kill enemies, and to afflict with various diseases. As they are much believed in, these pagÉs are well paid for their services. They are acquainted with the properties of many poisonous plants. One of their poisons most frequently used is terrible in its effects, causing the tongue and throat, as well as the intestines, to putrefy and rot away, leaving the sufferer to linger in torment for several days.61
Amongst many savage tribes their medicine-men pretend to remove diseases by sucking the affected part of the body. They have previously placed bits of bone, stones, etc., in their mouths, and they pretend they have removed them from the patient, and exhibit them as proofs of their success. The Shaman, or wizard-priest of the religion still existing amongst the peoples of Northern Asia, who pretends to have dealings with good and evil spirits, is the successor of the priests of Accad; thus is the Babylonian religion reduced to the level of the heathenism of Mongolia.
The aborigines of the Darling River, New South Wales, believe that sickness is caused by an enemy, who uses certain charms called the Yountoo and Molee. The Yountoo is made from a piece of bone taken from the leg of a deceased friend. This is wrapped up in a piece of the dried flesh from the body of another deceased friend. The package is tied with some hair from the head of a third friend. When this charm is used against an enemy, it is taken to the camp where he sleeps, and after certain rites are performed it is pointed at the person to be injured. The doctor of the tribe attributes disease to this sort of enchantment, and pretends to suck out of his patient the piece of bone which he declares has entered his body and caused the mischief. The Molee is a piece of white quartz, which is pointed at the victim with somewhat similar ceremonies and consequences. The possessors of these powerful charms take care to hide them from view. When the doctor, or Maykeeka, sucks out the Yountoo—bone chip—from his patient, he must throw it away. The Molee must be cast into water.
Mr. F. Bonney read a paper on “Some Customs of the Aborigines of the River Darling,” before the Anthropological Society of Great Britain, May 8th, 1883, in which the process of curing diseases is described. He says: “On one occasion, when I was camped in the Purnanga Ranges, I watched by the light of a camp-fire a doctor at work, sucking the back of a woman who was suffering from pains in that part. While she sat on a log a few yards distant from the camp-fire, he moved about her, making certain passes with boughs which he held, and then sucked for some time the place where pain was felt; at last he took something from his mouth, and, holding it towards the firelight, declared it to be a piece of bone. The old women sitting near loudly expressed their satisfaction at his success. I asked to be allowed to look at it, and it was given to me. I carelessly looked at it, and then pretended to throw it into the fire, but, keeping it between my fingers, I placed it in my pocket, when I could do so unobserved; and on the following morning, when I examined it by daylight, it proved to be a small splinter of wood, and not bone. At the time the patient appeared to be very much relieved by the treatment.” Another mode of treatment described by Mr. Bonney is that of sucking poison, supposed to have been sent into the patient by an enemy, through a string. The patient complained of sickness in the stomach; the woman doctor placed the patient on her back on the ground, tied a string round the middle of her naked body, leaving a loose end about eighteen inches long. The doctress then began sucking the string, passing the loose end through her mouth, from time to time spitting blood and saliva into a pot. She repeated this many times, until the patient professed to be cured.
The people of Timor-laut, near the island of New Guinea, scar themselves on the arms and shoulders with red-hot stones, in imitation of immense small-pox marks, in order to ward off that disease.62
Among the Kaffirs diseases are all attributed to three causes—either to being enchanted by an enemy, to the anger of certain beings whose abode appears to be in the rivers, or to the power of evil spirits.63
“Among the Kalmucks,” says Lubbock, “the cures are effected by exorcising the evil spirit. This is the business of the so-called ‘priests,’ who induce the evil spirit to quit the body of the patient and enter some other object. If a chief is ill, some other person is induced to take his name, and then, as is supposed, the evil spirit passes into his body.”64
Pritchard tells us that “the priests of the Negroes are also the physicians, as were the priests of Apollo and Æsculapius. The notions which the Negroes entertain of the causes of diseases are very different. The Watje attribute them to evil spirits whom they call Dobbo. When these are very numerous, they ask of their sacred cotton-tree permission to hunt them out. Hereupon a chase is appointed, and they do not cease following the demons with arms and great cries until they have chased them beyond their boundaries. This chase of the spirits of disease is very customary among many nations of Guinea, who universally believe that many diseases arise from enchantment, and others by the direction of the Deity.”65
It is interesting to note, as showing the ingenuity of the priests, that during the extremely dangerous rainy season the doctors’ remedies are of very little use; then the priests say this is because the gods at this particular season are obliged to appear at the court of the superior deity. During their absence at court, the priests cannot obtain access to them; and as without their advice they could not efficaciously prescribe, such medicines as they offer have little good effect.
The Antilles Indians in Columbus’s time went through the pretence of pulling the disease off the patient and blowing it away, telling it to begone to the sea or the mountains.
That the disease-demon may often be blown away by a plentiful supply of fresh air is now an article of every hygienist’s creed.
The Badaga folk, mountaineers of the Neilgherries, insure their children against accidents and sickness by talismans made of the earth and ashes of funeral pyres. They think the souls of the departed are so vexed at finding themselves in a novel condition that they are liable to kill people even without a motive. When an epidemic breaks out, they lay the blame on the person who died last, who is going about the country taking vengeance on his kindred.66
Monier Williams says they endeavour to induce the demon of pestilence, of typhoid fever, of the plague of rats or caterpillars, to enter into the body of a dancer, who acts as a medium and has power to exorcise the angry spirit. He has power to let loose rot or farcy amongst the flocks and herds, so the medium has to be conciliated. The Corumba of these mountain people is a wizard, the sicknesses of men and animals are all set down to his account. “Gratified by the evil reputation the Corumba enjoy, they offer to undo what they are supposed to have done, to remove the spells they are accused of having cast. The wheat is smutty, the flocks have the scab? Somebody’s head aches, some one’s stomach is out of order? One of these rogues turns up, offers to eject the demon; as it happens, the evil spirit is one of his particular cronies! He will cast out Beelzebub by Beelzebub.”67
Amongst the Western Inoits, says Elie Reclus,68 the magician of the people is called Angakok, signifying the “Great” or “the Ancient,” and he is guide, instructor, wonder-worker, physician, and priest. He accumulates in himself all influences; “he is public counsellor, justice of the peace, arbitrator in public and private affairs, artist of all kinds, poet, actor, buffoon.” Supposed to be in contact and close communication with the superior beings of the world of spirits, and to harbour in his body many demons of various kinds, he is supposed to be invested with omnipotence, he can chase away the disease-demons, and put even death itself to flight. The angakok defends his people from the demons who take the form of cancers, rheumatism, paralysis, and skin diseases. He exorcises the sick man with stale urine, like the Bochiman poison-doctors.69
The Cambodians exorcise the small-pox demon with the urine of a white horse.70
Thiers (Des Superstitions), quoted by Reclus, says that Slavonic rustics asperse their cattle with herbs of St. John boiled in urine to keep ill-luck away from them; and that French peasant women used to wash their hands in their own urine, or in that of their husbands and children, to prevent evil enchantments doing them harm. Reclus says: “When a diagnosis puzzles an angakok, he has recourse to a truly ingenious proceeding. He fastens to the invalid’s head a string, the other end of which is attached to a stick; this he raises, feels, balances on his hand, and turns in every direction. Various operations follow, having for their object the forcible removal of the spider from the luckless wretch whose flesh it devours. He will cleanse and set to rights as much as he is able—whence his name ‘Mender of Souls.’ A wicked witch, present though invisible, can undo the efforts of the conjurer, and even communicate to him the disease, rendering him the victim of his devotion; black magic can display more power than white magic. Then, seeing the case to be desperate, the honest angakok summons, if possible, one or more brethren, and the physicians of souls strive in concert to comfort the dying man; with a solemn voice they extol the felicities of Paradise, chanting softly a farewell canticle, which they accompany lightly upon the drum.”71
The superstitious natives of the Lower Congo have a singular custom, when anybody dies, of compelling some victim or other to drink a poison made from the bark of the Erythrophloeum guineensis. It usually acts as a powerful emetic, and is administered in the hope that it may “bring up” the devil. Their medicine-man is called nganga, and he is taught a language quite different from the ordinary tongue, and this is kept secret from females. “No one,” says Mr. H.H. Johnston (“On the Races of the Congo”),72 “has yet been able to examine into their sacred tongue.” The use of Latin by civilized doctors is not unlike this African custom.
The mountaineers of the Neilgherries endeavour to induce the demon they invoke to enter into the body of the “medium,” a dancer who pretends to the intoxication of prophecy. If they can persuade the demon of pestilence or typhoid fever to enter into the medium, it becomes possible to act upon and influence him.73
The people of Tartary make a great puppet when fever is prevalent, which they call the Demon of Intermittent Fevers, and which when completed they set up in the tent of the patients.
Mr. Forbes, in his account of the tribes of the island of Timor, says that the natives believe all diseases to be the result of sorcery, and they carry a variety of herbs and charms to avert its influence. He says: “I had as a servant an old man, who one morning complained of being in a very discomposed and generally uncomfortable state, and of being afraid he was going to die. He had seen, he said, the spirit of his mother in the night, she had been present by him and had spoken with him. He feared, therefore, that he was about to die. He begged of me some tobacco and rice to offer to her, which I gave him. He retired a little way to a great stone in the ground, and laying on it some betel and pinang, with a small quantity of chalk, along with a little tobacco and rice, he repeated for some eight or ten minutes an invocation which I did not understand. The rice and the chalk he left on the stone, which were very shortly after devoured by my fowls; the tobacco, betel, and pinang he took away again, to be utilised by himself.”74
When the medicine-man of these tribes calls to see a patient, he looks very closely at him, to endeavour to perceive the sorcerer who is making him ill. Then he returns to his home and makes up some medicines, which the happy patient has not however to swallow, but the drugs having been packed by the doctor into a bundle with a small stone, are thrown away as far as possible from the sick man; the stone finds out the sorcerer and returns to the doctor, who gives it to his patient and tells him it will cure him if he will wear it about his neck. This affords another illustration of the universal belief of the value of amulets in medicine.
Medicine amongst certain tribes has a connection with the adoration of particular objects and animals believed to be related to each separate stock or blood-kindred of human beings, and which is known in anthropology as totemism. The Algonquin Indians use the name, Bear, Wolf, Tortoise, Deer, or Rabbit to designate each of a number of clans into which the race is divided. The animal is considered as an ancestor or protector of the tribe.
In considering the institutions of “totemism” and “medicine,” we must not forget that savage “medicine” has a function somewhat different from that of medicine in our sense of the word. Some doubt if there be any real distinction between the totem and the medicine.75
Schoolcraft says that among the Sioux a clan consists of individuals who use the same roots for medicine, and they are initiated into the clan by a great medicine-dance. The Sioux and other tribes make a bag out of the skin of the medicine (totem?) animal, which acts as a talisman, and is inherited by the son. Here we have an instance of the reverence inspired by an inherited medicine. It is a little surprising that we have so few evidences of the worship of healing herbs and drugs.
Demon-worship is the explanation of the mysteries of Dionysus Zagreus and the Chthonic and Bacchic orgies. M. Reclus says: “If we knew nothing otherwise of these orgies, we could obtain a sufficiently correct idea of them by visiting the GhÂts, the Neilgherries, and the Vindhyas.”76
THE MEDICINE-DANCE OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS.
[Face p. 32.
CHAPTER V.
PRIMITIVE MEDICINE.
Bleeding.—Scarification.—Use of Medicinal Herbs amongst the Aborigines of Australia, South America, Africa, etc.
The Healing Craft of many of the northern tribes of Australia is thus described by Mr. Palmer:—
“Among the northern tribes many devices and charms are resorted to in the cases of pains and sickness. The doctors are men who, it is supposed, possess great powers of healing, some of which they obtain from the spirits. They use stones and crystals to put away sickness from any one, and sometimes they bandage the afflicted part with string tightly till no part of the skin is visible. One common plan of alleviating pain is by bleeding, supposing that the pain comes away with the blood. For this minute cuts are made through the skin with pieces of broken flint, or the edge of a broken mussel-shell, over the part affected, and the blood is wiped off with a stick. Sometimes the doctor ties a string from the sick place, say the chest, and rubs the end of it across his gums, spitting into a kooliman of water, and passing the string through also; he then points to the blood in the water as evidence of his skill in drawing it from the sick person. Stones are sucked out with the mouth, and exhibited as having been taken from the body. A good number of plants are used in sickness as drinks, and for external application. A broken arm is cured with splints made of bark and wound round tightly. Snake-bite is cured by scarifying and sucking the wound, and by then using a poultice of box-bark, bruised and heated.”77
Mr. E. Palmer says that “the Australian aborigines possessed a considerable knowledge of indigenous plants, and their acquaintance with natural history was very accurate. They could only have obtained this knowledge by close observation and generations of experience. With the extermination of the blacks this information has completely died out, and it can only now be obtained in far-distant places like North Queensland, where the aborigines have not been killed off by contact with civilization. They have much experience in the healing virtues and properties of plants, as also of the kinds best suited for poisoning fish.”78 Great skill is exhibited by their mode of preparing plants by fire and water and other processes, before using them as food; if partaken of in their natural state, many of them would be very deleterious, if not actually poisonous. The Dioscorea sativa, or karro plant, has large tubers, which are first roasted, then broken in water and strained or squeezed through fine bags made of fibre into long bark troughs, then the product is washed in many waters, the sediment is well stirred while the water is poured in; by this means the bitter principle is extracted, and a yellow fecula like hominy is produced. Careya australis has a root which is used to poison fish, though its fruit is eaten uncooked by the natives. Manna is gathered from Eucalyptus terminalis. Cymbidium caniculatum is used for dysentery and other bowel disorders. The nuts of the Cycas media are very poisonous unless prepared by fire and water, and then they can be used as food. The seeds of Entada scandens are only fit for eating after baking and pounding, as is the case with many other plants cleverly manipulated by the blacks. The leaves of Ocimum sanctum are infused in water and drunk for sickness. A wash is made from the bruised bark of the gutta-percha tree, ExcÆcaria parviflora. The leaves of Loranthus quandong, the mistletoe of the Acacia hemalophylla, are infused in water and drunk for fevers, ague, etc.; it is doubtful whether they have any virtue, but mistletoe was once a very highly prized medicine in Europe, though now wholly obsolete. The leaves of Melaleuca leucadendron are used in infusion for headache, colds, and general sickness. The melaleuca is the cajeput tree, and cajeput oil is undoubtedly a valuable medicine. StillÉ says, “It is of marked utility in cases of nervous vomiting, nervous dysphagia, dyspnoea, and hiccup.”79 Externally it is valuable in nervous headache and neuralgia.
The natives make great use medicinally of the various species of eucalyptus. The leaves of Eucalyptus tetradonta are made into a drink for fevers and sickness with headache, etc. The Eucalyptus globulus recently introduced into civilized medicine comes from Australia. Plectranthus congestus, Pterocaulon glandulosus, Gnaphalium luteo-album (several of this species are used in European medicine in bronchitis and diarrhoea, and one of them is called “Life Everlasting”), Heliotropium ovalifolium, and Moschosma polystachium, are all used in the medical practice of these despised aborigines, and are probably quite as valuable as the majority of the herbs recommended in our old herbals and pharmacopoeias.
The aborigines of the north-western provinces of South America have long been famous for their extensive knowledge of the properties of medicinal plants, and even now they possess secrets for which we may envy them.80
The arrow-poison used by the Indians of the interior is made from a plant of the strychnos family. Those of the Pacific coast prepare a poison from the secretion exuding from the skin of a small frog; this by a certain process of decomposition they convert into a powerful blood-poison. It is said that when these tribes were preparing poisons for use in time of war, it was their ancient practice to test their efficacy on the old women of the tribe, and not on the lower animals, exhibiting in this respect a superior knowledge of toxicology than is shown by those pharmacologists of our own day who test on animals the drugs they propose administering to man. Mr. R.B. White, in his notes on these aboriginal tribes, says that the Indians in the State of Antioquia were in the habit of poisoning the salt springs in the time of the Spanish invasion; they covered the spring with branches of a tree called the “Doncel,” which imparted such venomous properties to the water that after a lapse of three hundred years it still retains its deadly properties; when animals now get at the water, as many as three horses have been known to be killed in one night by drinking it.81
The study of the means of capturing fish by poisoning the water—a practice which is universal amongst savages—must have led to many observations on the properties of poisonous plants. Some considerable knowledge of the risks and uses of various leaves and berries must have been acquired in this way. The people of Timor-laut intoxicate fish with rice steeped in poisonous climbing plants.82
The aborigines of the River Darling, New South Wales, feed their very sick and weak patients upon blood drawn from the bodies of their male friends. It is generally taken raw by the invalid, sometimes however it is slightly cooked by putting hot ashes in it.83
The practice is disgusting, but scarcely more so than one which was prescribed a few years ago by the great physicians of Paris, who ordered their anÆmic patients to drink hot blood from the slaughtered oxen at the abattoirs. Mr. Bonney says that the aborigines referred to willingly bleed themselves till they are weak and faint to provide the food they consider necessary for the sick person.
The acacias are very abundant in Australia, in India, and Africa. This order of plants produces gum arabic and gum Senegal. The Tasmanians use the gum of Acacia sophora as a food.
The eucalyptus or blue-gum tree grows on the hills of Tasmania and in Victoria on the mainland of Australia; it was introduced into Europe in 1856, and has been very extensively used as a remedy for intermittent fever, influenza, and as a powerful disinfectant.
“As in all similar cases,” says StillÉ, “the discovery of its virtues was accidental. It is alleged that more than forty years ago the crew of a French man-of-war, having lost a number of men with ‘pernicious fever,’ put into Botany Bay, where the remaining sick were treated with eucalyptus, and rapidly recovered. It is also said that the virtues of the tree were well known to the aboriginal inhabitants.”
A good illustration of the ways in which the properties of plants have been discovered, and of the relation of poisonous to harmless herbs, may be found in the practice of the American Indians in their use of the manioc, a large shrub producing roots somewhat like parsnips. They carefully extract the juice, which is a deadly poison, and then grate the dried roots to a fine powder, which they afterwards convert into the cassava bread. How was this treatment of the root discovered? It was simply due to the fact that one species of the shrub is devoid of any poisonous property, and has only to be washed and may then be eaten with impunity. No doubt this non-poisonous root was the first which was used for food; then when the supply ran short they were driven by necessity to find out the way to use the almost identical root of the poisonous variety, which when divested of its juice is even better for food than the harmless root. Probably this was only discovered after many experiments and fatalities. “Necessity, the mother of invention,” in this as in most other things, ultimately directed the natives to the right way of dealing with this article of diet.
The male fern is a very ancient remedy for tape-worm, and to the present day physicians have found nothing so successful for removing this parasite. The plant is indigenous to Canada, Mexico, South America, India, Africa, and Europe. The negroes of South America have long used worm-seed (Chenopodium anthelminticum) as a vermifuge for lumbricoid worms. The plant grows wild in the United States, and has been introduced into the Pharmacopoeia as a remedy especially adapted for the expulsion of the round-worms of children. Kousso (Brayera anthelmintica) has been employed from time immemorial in Abyssinia for the expulsion of tape-worm. It has been introduced into the British Pharmacopoeia.
Some tribes of the Upper Orinoco, Rio Negro, etc., have been known to subsist for months on no other food than an edible earth, a kind of clay containing oxide of iron, and which is of a reddish-brown colour.
M. Cortambert, at a meeting of the Geographical Society in 1862, described this singular food, and said it seemed to be rather a stay for the stomach than a nourishment. Some white people in Venezuela have imitated the earth-eaters, and do not despise balls of fat earth.84
Savages require much larger doses of drugs than civilized people. Mr. Bonney relates85 that he usually gave the aborigines of New South Wales half a pint or more of castor oil for a dose. Another man took three drops of croton oil as an ordinary dose.
Professor Bentley in 1862-63 contributed to the Pharmaceutical Journal a series of articles on New American Remedies which have been introduced into medical practice in consequence of their reputation amongst the Indians. Yellow-root (Xanthorrhiza apiifolia) has long been employed by the various tribes of North American Indians as a tonic, and may be compared to quassia or calumba root. It is included in the United States Pharmacopoeia. Its active principle seems to be berberine.
The blue Cohosh plant (Caulophyllum thalictroides) has for ages been used by the aborigines of North America as a valuable remedy for female complaints. A tea of the root is employed amongst the Chippeway Indians on Lake Superior as an aid to parturition. The earliest colonists obtained their knowledge of the virtues of the blue cohosh from the natives, and it has for many years been a favourite diuretic remedy in the States. Its common names are pappoose-root, squaw-root, and blueberry-root. Its active principle is called caulophyllin.
Twin-leaf (Jeffersonia diphylla) is a popular remedy in Ohio and other North American States in rheumatism. It is called rheumatism-root. In chemical composition it is similar to senega.
Blood-root, or puccoon (Sanguinaria canadensis), has been used for centuries by North American Indians as a medicine. It has been introduced into the United States Pharmacopoeia. It is an alterative, and is useful in certain forms of dyspepsia, bronchitis, croup, and asthma. Its physiological action, however, bears no relation to its medicinal uses (StillÉ and Maisch). Its active principle is sanguinarina.
Sarracenia purpurea, Indian cup, or side-saddle plant, is a native of North America, and much used by the Indians in dyspepsia, sick headache, etc.
The valuable bitter stomachic and tonic calumba-root comes to us from the forests of Eastern Africa, between Ibo and the Zambesi. Its African name is kalumb; it depends for its therapeutic value on the berberine which it contains, and which is found in several other plants. The natives of tropical Africa, the North American Indians, and the semi-barbarian tribes of Hindostan and China have all been impressed with the medicinal value of berberine. Before quinine was commonly used in medicine, this valuable drug was estimated most highly for its very similar properties. There can be no doubt that it was introduced into medicine by savages.
Jalap comes to us from Mexico. It was named from the city of Xalapa.
Cinchona bark was used by the savages of Peru long before it was introduced into European medicine.
Guaiacum, so valuable in chronic rheumatism, was introduced into European medicine from the West India Islands and the northern coasts of South America.
The excellent and popular tonic, quassia-wood, reaches us from Jamaica.
Logwood, a valuable astringent, largely used in diarrhoea, is a native of Campeachy and other parts of Central America, and grows in the West India Islands and India.
Copaiba, an oleo-resin from the copaiva tree, comes from the West Indies and tropical parts of America, chiefly from the valley of the Amazon. It is one of our most valuable remedies in diseases of the genito-urinary organs.
Turkey corn, or Turkey pea (Dicentra, Corydalis formosa) grows in Canada and as far south as Kentucky. It has a reputation as a tonic, diuretic and alterative medicine, and is used in skin diseases, syphilis, etc.
The negroes use the prickly ash, or toothache shrub (Xanthoxylum fraxineum), as a blood purifier, especially in the spring. It has long been officinal in the United States Pharmacopoeia, and is considered highly serviceable in chronic rheumatism.
The shrubby trefoil (Ptelea trifoliata) is a North American shrub, much valued in dyspepsia, and as a stimulant in the typhoid state. Its active principle is berberine.
The above are merely a few examples taken at random of the valuable medicinal plants used by savages and primitive peoples.
Thus, as might have been expected, the discovery of the Americas led to the introduction of many new drugs into medical practice.
Savages eat enormously.
Wrangel says each of the Yakuts ate in a day six times as many fish as he could eat. Cochrane describes a five-year-old child of this race as devouring three candles, several pounds of sour frozen butter, and a large piece of yellow soap, and adds: “I have repeatedly seen a Yakut, or a Yongohsi, devour forty pounds of meat in a day.”86
Yet the savage is less powerful than the civilized man. “He is unable,” says Spencer, “to exert suddenly as great an amount of force, and he is unable to continue the expenditure of force for so long a time.”
CHAPTER VI.
PRIMITIVE SURGERY.
Arrest of Bleeding.—The Indian as Surgeon.—Stretchers, Splints, and Flint Instruments.—Ovariotomy.—Brain Surgery.—Massage.—Trepanning.—The CÆsarean Operation.—Inoculation.
Primitive man, from the earliest ages, must have been a diligent student of medicine; it has indeed been wisely said that the first man was the first physician. That is to say, he must have been at least as careful to avoid noxious things and select good ones as the beasts, and, as in the lowest scale, he must have been able in some degree to observe, reflect, and compare one thing with another, and so find out what hurt and what healed him, he would at once begin to practise the healing art, either that branch of it which is directed towards maintaining the health or that of alleviating suffering. When his fellow-men were sick and died, he would be led to wonder why they perished; and when other men stricken in like manner recovered, he would speculate as to the causes of their cure. It is probable that at first little attention was paid to the loss of blood when an artery was severed. Soon, however, it would be remarked that under such conditions the man would faint, and perhaps die. In process of time it would be observed that when the injured blood-vessel was by any means, natural or artificial, closed, the man quickly recovered. Then some one wiser than the other would bind a strip of fibre or a piece of the skin of a beast around the bleeding limb, and the hÆmorrhage would cease, and the operator would gain credit and reward. He would then, naturally, give himself airs, and pretend, in course of time, to some importance, and so become a healer by profession. It would soon be noticed that those who, in the search for berries in the woods, ate of certain kinds, more or less promptly died, and those who had abstained from their use survived. It would be understood that such berries must not be eaten. Or again, a man suffering from some pain in his stomach would eat of a particular plant that seemed good for food, and his pain would be relieved: it might be ages before primitive man would arrive at the conclusion that there was some connection between the pain and its disappearance after eating of the plant in question; but in process of time the two things would be associated, and everybody would use the curative plant for the particular pain.
It is natural to suppose that many such things would happen, and we know as a fact that they have so happened in numberless instances.
Probably empirical medicine, in the most ancient times and amongst the most savage tribes, had an armoury of weapons against pain and sickness not greatly inferior to our own Materia Medica. The origin of the use of most of our valuable medicines cannot be discovered.
“As no man can say who it was that first invented the use of clothes and houses against the inclemency of the weather, so also can no investigation point out the origin of medicine—mysterious as the sources of the Nile. There has never been a time when it was not.”87
The origin of surgery is probably much older than that of medicine, if by the term surgery we mean the application of herbs to wounds, either as bandages or on account of their healing properties, and the use of medicinal baths the like. Mr. Gladstone, in an address to a society of herbalists, which was reported in the Daily News, 27th March, 1890, said that an accident which occurred to himself, when cutting down a tree, illustrated the very beginning of the healing art. He cut his finger with the axe, and found that he had no handkerchief with him with which to bind up the wound, so he took a leaf of the tree nearest to him, and fastened it round his injured finger. The bleeding stopped at once, and the wound, he declared, healed much more quickly and favourably than previous injuries treated in a more scientific manner. There is no doubt whatever that this is a good example of the primitive manner of treating cuts and other flesh wounds. The cooling properties of leaves would be recognised by the most primitive peoples; and as a cut or other wound, by the process of inflammation, at once begins to burn and throb, a cooling leaf would be the most natural thing to apply. Some leaves which possess styptic and resinous properties would staunch bleeding very effectually, and the mere act of binding round the cut an application like a leaf would serve to draw together the edges of the wound, and afford an antiseptic plaster of the most scientific nature. It was, in fact, by just such means that the valuable styptic properties of the matico leaves were first discovered by Europeans.
If, in the depths of the forest, an Indian breaks his leg or arm (said Dr. Kingston in his address at the British Medical Association meeting at Nottingham, 1892), splints of softest material are at once improvised. Straight branches are cut, of uniform length and thickness. These are lined with down-like moss, or scrapings or shavings of wood; or with fine twigs interlaid with leaves, if in summer; or with the curled-up leaves of the evergreen cedar or hemlock, if in winter; and the whole is surrounded with withes of willow or osier, or young birch. Occasionally it is the soft but sufficiently unyielding bark of the poplar or the bass-wood. Sometimes, when near the marshy margin of our lakes or rivers, the wounded limb is afforded support with wild hay or reeds of uniform length and thickness.
To carry a patient to his wigwam, or to an encampment, a stretcher is quickly made of four young saplings, interwoven at their upper ends, and on this elastic springy couch the injured man is borne away by his companions. When there are but two persons, and an accident happens to one of them, two young trees of birch or beech or hickory are used. Their tops are allowed to remain to aid in diminishing the jolting caused by the inequalities of the ground. No London carriage-maker ever constructed a spring which could better accomplish the purpose. A couple of crossbars preserve the saplings in position, and the bark of the elm or birch, cut into broad bands, and joined to either side, forms an even bed. In this way an injured man is brought by his companion to a settlement, and often it has been found, on arrival, that the fractured bones are firmly united, and the limb is whole again. This is effected in less time than with the whites, for the reparative power of these children of the forest is remarkable. In their plenitude of health, osseous matter is poured out in large quantity, and firm union is soon effected.
The reparative power of the aborigines, when injured, is equalled by the wonderful stoicism with which they bear injuries, and inflict upon themselves severest torture. They are accustomed to cut into abscesses with pointed flint; they light up a fire at a distance from the affected part (our counter-irritation); they amputate limbs with their hunting-knives, checking the hÆmorrhage with heated stones, as surgeons were accustomed to do in Europe in the time of Ambroise ParÉ; and sometimes they amputate their own limbs with more sang froid than many young surgeons will display when operating on others. The stumps of limbs amputated in this primitive manner are well formed, for neatness is the characteristic of all the Indian’s handiwork.
The aborigines are familiar with, and practise extensively, the use of warm fomentations. In every tribe their old women are credited with the possession of a knowledge of local bathing with hot water, and of medicated decoctions. The herbs they use are known to a privileged few, and enhance the consideration in which their possessors are held.
The Turkish bath, in a simpler but not less effective form, is well known to them. If one of their tribe suffers from fever, or from the effects of long exposure to cold, a steam bath is readily improvised. The tent of deer-skin is tightly closed; the patient is placed in one corner: heated stones are put near him, and on these water is poured till the confined air is saturated with vapour. Any degree of heat and any degree of moisture can be obtained in this way. Europeans often avail themselves of this powerful sudatory when suffering from rheumatism.
The aborigines have their herbs—a few, not many. They have their emetics and laxatives, astringents and emollients—all of which are proffered to the suffering without fee or reward. The “Indian teas,” “Indian balsams,” and other Indian “cure-alls”—the virtues of which it sometimes takes columns of the daily journals to chronicle—are not theirs. To the white man is left this species of deception.88
Mr. E. Palmer says that there is a tribe of Australian aborigines, called “Kalkadoona,” adjoining the Mygoodano tribe of the Cloncurry, who practise certain surgical operations at their Bora initiations of youths. They operate on the urethra with flint knives. The same custom can be traced from the Cloncurry River to the Great Australian Bight in the south. The females are in some of the south-western tribes operated on in some manner to prevent conception. It is supposed that the ovary is taken out, as in the operation of spaying.89
Such operations are sometimes performed with a mussel-shell.
Sir John Lubbock says of the Society Islanders that “they had no knowledge of medicine as distinct from witchcraft; but some wonderful stories are told of their skill in surgery. I will give perhaps the most extraordinary. ‘It is related,’ says Mr. Ellis, ‘although,’ he adds with perfect gravity, ‘I confess I can scarcely believe it, that on some occasions, when the brain has been injured as well as the bone, they have opened the skull, taken out the injured portion of the brain, and, having a pig ready, have killed it, taken out the pig’s brains, put them in the man’s head and covered them up.’”90
Massage in one form or another has been practised from immemorial ages by all nations. Captain Cook tells us, in his narrative of the people of Otaheite, New Holland, and other parts of Oceania, that they practise massage in a way very similar to that which is employed by more civilized nations. For the relief of muscular fatigue they resort to a process which they call toogi-toogi, or light percussion regularly applied for a long time. They also employ kneading and friction under the names of Miti and Fota. African travellers inform us that the medicine-men use these processes for the relief of injuries to the joints, fractures, and pain of the muscles. Our word shampooing is said to have been derived from the Hindu term chamboning. Dr. N.B. Emerson, in 1870, gave an account of the lomi-lomi of the Sandwich Islanders. He says that, “when footsore and weary in every muscle, so that no position affords rest, and sleep cannot be obtained, these manipulations relieve the stiffness and soothe to sleep, so that the unpleasant effects of excessive exercise are not felt the next day, but an unwonted suppleness of joint and muscle comes instead.”91
When we receive a blow or strike our bodies against a hard substance, we instinctively rub the affected part. This is one of the simplest and most effectual examples of natural surgery. When the emollient properties of oil were discovered, rubbing with oil, or inunction, was practised. The use of oil for this purpose in the East is extremely ancient. Amongst the Greeks there was a class of rubbers who anointed the bodies of the athletes. The oil was very thoroughly rubbed in, so that the pores of the skin were closed and the profuse perspiration thereby prevented. After the contest the athlete was subjected to massage with oil, so as to restore the tone of the strained muscles. These aliptae came to be recognised as a sort of medical trainers. A similar class of slaves attended their masters in the Roman baths, and they were also possessed of a certain kind of medical knowledge.
Discussing the origin of the operation of trepanning, Sprengel says that “nothing is more instructive, in the history of human knowledge, than to go back to the origin, or the clumsy rough sketch of the discoveries to which man was conducted by accident or reflection, and to follow the successive improvements which his methods and his instruments undergo.”92 The name of the inventor of this operation is lost in the night of time. Hippocrates gives us the first account of trepanning in his treatise on Wounds of the Head. We know, however, that it was performed long before his time. Dr. Handerson, the translator of Baas’ History of Medicine, says that human skulls of the neolithic period have been discovered which bear evidences of trepanning.93
The operation of cutting for the stone, like many other of the most difficult operations of surgery, was for a long time given over to ignorant persons who make a speciality of it. Sprengel attributes this injurious custom to the ridiculous pride of the properly instructed doctors, who disdained to undertake operations which could be successfully performed by laymen.94
The Bafiotes, on the coast of South Guinea, practise cupping. They make incisions in the skin, and place horns over the wounds, and then suck out the air, withdrawing the blood by these means.95
“Felkin saw a case of the CÆsarean operation in Central Africa performed by a man. At one stroke an incision was made through both the abdominal walls and the uterus; the opening in the latter organ was then enlarged, the hÆmorrhage checked by the actual cautery, and the child removed. While an assistant compressed the abdomen, the operator then removed the placenta. The bleeding from the abdominal walls was then checked. No sutures were placed in the walls of the uterus, but the abdominal parietes were fastened together by seven figure-of-eight sutures, formed with polished iron needles and threads of bark. The wound was then dressed with a paste prepared from various roots, the woman placed quietly upon her abdomen, in order to favour perfect drainage, and the task of this African Spencer Wells was finished. It appears that the patient was first rendered half unconscious by banana wine. One hour after the operation the patient was doing well, and her temperature never rose above 101° F., nor her pulse above 108. On the eleventh day the wound was completely healed, and the woman apparently as well as usual.”96
The South Sea Islanders perform trepanning, and some Australian tribes perform ovariotomy.97
The missionary d’Entrecolles was the first to inform the Western world of the method of inoculation for the small-pox, which the Chinese have followed for many centuries.98
In many countries, and from the earliest times, says Sprengel,99 it has been customary to inoculate children with small-pox, because experience has shown that a disease thus provoked assumes a milder and more benign form than the disease which comes naturally.
CHAPTER VII.
UNIVERSALITY OF THE USE OF INTOXICANTS.
Egyptian Beer and Brandy.—Mexican Pulque.—Plant-worship.—Union with the Godhead by Alcohol.—Soma.—The Cow-religion.—Caxiri.—Murwa Beer.—Bacchic Rites.—Spiritual Exaltation by Wine.
One of the strongest desires of human nature is the passion for some kind or another of alcoholic stimulants. Intoxicating liquors are made by savages in primeval forests, and travellers in all parts of the world have found the natives conversant with the art of preparing some sort of stimulating liquor in the shape of beer, wine, or spirit. The ancient Egyptians had their beer and brandy, the Mexicans their aloe beer or pulque. Probably the art of preparing fermented drinks was in each nation discovered by accident. Berries soaked in water, set aside and forgotten, saccharine roots steeped in water and juices preserved for future use, have probably taught primitive man everywhere to manufacture stimulating beverages. The influence of alcoholic drinks on the development of the human mind must have been very great. If primitive man has learned so much from his dreams, what has he not learned from the exaltation produced by medicinal plants and alcoholic infusions? If the savage conceives the leaves of a tree waving in the breeze to be influenced by a spirit, it is certain that a medicinal plant or a fermented liquor would be believed to be possessed by a beneficent or evil principle or being. A poison would be possessed by a demon, a healing plant by a good spirit, a stimulating liquor by a god. Plant-worship would on these principles be found amongst the earliest religious practices of mankind, and so we find it, although not to the extent we might have expected.
Some savage peoples worship plants and make offerings to the spirits which dwell in certain trees. It would seem that it is not the plant or tree itself which is thus venerated, but the ghost which makes it its dwelling. In classic times “the ivy was sacred to Osiris and Bacchus, the pine to Neptune, herb mercury to Hermes, black hellebore to Melampus, centaury to Chiron, the laurel to Aloeus, the hyacinth to Ajax, the squill to Epimenes,” etc.100
Herbert Spencer thinks that plant-worship arose from the connection between plants and the intoxication which they produce. It is very remarkable that almost all peoples of whom we have any knowledge produce from the maceration of various vegetable substances some kind of intoxicating liquor, beer, wine, or spirit. As the excitement produced by fainting, fever, hysteria, or insanity is ascribed amongst savages and half-civilized peoples to a possessing spirit, so also is any exaltation of the mind, by whatever means produced, attributed to a similar cause. Supernatural beings they consider may be swallowed in food or drink, especially the latter.101
Vambery speaks of opium-eaters who intoxicated themselves with the drug; that they might be nearer the beings they loved so well. The Mandingoes think that intoxication brings them into relation with the godhead. A Papuan Islander hearing about the Christian God said, “Then this God is certainly in your arrack, for I never feel happier than when I have drunk plenty of it.”102
Any one who reads the sacred books of the East for the first time, especially the Vedic hymns, will be puzzled to say whether the Soma, which is referred to so often, is a deity or something to drink. If we turn up the word in the index volume of the EncyclopÆdia Britannica, we are astonished to find such an entry as this: “Soma, a drink, in Brahminical ritual, iv. 205; as a deity, iv. 205; vii. 249.” The soma, speaking scientifically, is an intoxicating liquor prepared from the juice of a kind of milk-weed, Asclepias acida, sometimes called the moon-plant. In the Rig-Veda and the Zend Avesta (where it is called Haoma) it appears as a mighty god endowed with the most wonderful exhilarating properties. Herbert Spencer, in the chapter of the Sociology entitled “Plant-Worship,” gives some of the expressions used in the Rig-Veda concerning this fermented soma-juice.
“This [Soma] when drunk, stimulates my speech [or hymn]; this called forth the ardent thought.” (R.V. vi. 47, 3.)
“The ruddy Soma, generating hymns, with the powers of a poet.” (R.V. ix. 25, 5.)
“We have drunk the Soma, we have become immortal, we have entered into light, we have known the gods,” etc. (R.V. viii. 48, 3.)
“The former [priests] having strewed the sacred grass, offered up a hymn to thee, O Soma, for great strength and food.” (R.V. lx. 110, 7.)
“For through thee, O pure Soma, our wise forefathers of old performed their sacred rites.” (R.V. ix. 96, 11.)
“Soma—do thou enter into us,” etc.
Dr. Muir calls Soma “the Indian Dionysus.”
In Peru tobacco “has been called the sacred herb.”
Markham says, “The Peruvians still look upon coca with feelings of superstitious veneration.” In the time of the Incas it was sacrificed to the sun. In North Mexico, Bancroft says that some of the natives “have a great veneration for the hidden virtues of poisonous plants, and believe that if they crush or destroy one, some harm will happen to them.” “And at the present time,” says Mr. Spencer, “in the Philippine Islands, the ignatius bean, which contains strychnia and is used as a medicine, is worn as an amulet and held capable of miracles.” The Babylonians seem to have held the palm-tree as sacred, doubtless because fermented palm-juice makes an intoxicating drink.
The Palal, the supreme pontiff of the cow-religion of the Toda people of the Neilgherries, is initiated with incantations, and the smearing of his body with the juice of a sacred shrub called the tude.103
He also drinks some of the extract mixed with water. He is purified by soaking himself with the juice of this plant, and in a week has become a god; he is the supreme being of the Todas. This transmutation is suggestive of the sacred soma.104
The aborigines of the Amazon make an intoxicating drink from wild fruits, which they use at their dances and festivals.105 The people on the Rio Negro use a liquor called “xirac” for the same purpose. The Brazilian Indians have their “caxiri,” which is the same thing; it is a beer made from mandiocca cakes. This mandiocca is chewed by the old women, spat into a pan, and soaked in water till it ferments. The Marghi people of North Africa have an intoxicating liquor called “Komil,” made of Guinea-corn, which Barth said tastes like bad beer, and is very confusing to the brain.106
The Apaches make an intoxicating liquor from cactus juice, or with boiled and fermented corn. Their drunkenness is a preparation for religious acts.107
The Kolarians of Bengal believe that the flowers of the maowah tree (Bassia latifolia) will cure almost every kind of sickness. “Not a cot,” says Reclus,108 “but distils a heady liquor from the petals; not a Khond man who does not get royally drunk.”
The people of the Nepal Himalayas make a beer from half-fermented millet, which they call Murwa; it is weak, but very refreshing. Hooker says the millet-seed is moistened, and ferments for two days; it is then put into a vessel of wicker-work, lined with india-rubber gum to make it water tight; and boiling water is poured in it with a ladle of gourd, from a cauldron that stands all day over the fire. The fluid, when fresh, tasted like negus.109
The fermented juice of the cocoa-nut palm makes an intoxicating toddy, of which some birds in the forests round Bombay are as fond as are the natives themselves.110
The natives of Tahiti made an intoxicating drink by chewing the fresh root of the “ava,” a plant of the pepper tribe (Piper methysticum), long before Europeans taught them to ferment the fruits of the country about the year 1796. The chewed root was rinsed in water, and by fermentation a drowsy form of intoxicating liquor was produced of which the natives were extremely fond. They now prefer gin and brandy. The effects of ava or kava intoxication are said to be somewhat similar to those of opium. The Nukahivans drink kava as a remedy for phthisis; it would seem to be of real value in bronchitis, as a chemical examination of the root shows it to contain an oleo-resin probably somewhat akin to balsam of Peru or tolu. It is an ally of the matico, and in its nature and operation closely resembles cubeb and copaiba, which are used to produce a constriction of the capillary vessels.
Cascarilla bark and other barks of the various species of croton, of the Bahama and West India Islands, have valuable stimulant properties universally recognised in modern medicine. They are used in the treatment of dyspepsia and as a mild tonic.
The Carib races were fully conversant with the valuable properties of these drugs; the native priests or doctors used the dried plants for fumigations and in religious ceremonies; and curiously enough at the present day cascarilla bark is one of the ingredients of incense. An infusion of the leaves was used internally in Carib medicine, and the dried bark was mixed with tobacco and smoked, as is often done in civilized lands.
Anacreontic poetry and Bacchic rites were merely intellectual developments of sentiments which the savage feels and expresses in a coarse animal way, just as the alderman’s sense of gratification and perfect contentment after a civic banquet is not altogether different in kind from that felt by a replete quadruped.
Alcoholic intoxication must have produced in primitive man visions far surpassing those of his pleasantest dreams, and his brain must have been filled with images, sometimes pleasant, sometimes horrible, of a more pronounced character than those which visited him in sleep. At such times would come some of the visitants from the world of imagination to the mind of primitive man which have had the most important influence on his intellectual development. The drinking customs of our working classes of the present day are in a great degree prompted by the longing which man in every condition has to escape for a while from the squalid, material surroundings of daily life into the ideal world of intellectual pleasures, however low these may often be. “A national love for strong drink,” says a competent authority,111 “is a characteristic of the nobler and more energetic populations of the world; it accompanies public and private enterprise, constancy of purpose, liberality of thought, and aptitude for war.” Tea, haschish, hops, alcohol, and tobacco stimulate in small doses and narcotise in larger; there have been cases known of tea intoxication.112
The desire of escaping from self into an ideal world, a world of novelty and pleasures unimaginable, had much to do with the festivals in Greece in honour of Dionysus; it was in some places considered a crime to remain sober at the Dionysia; to be intoxicated on such occasions was to show one’s gratitude for the gift of wine.
CHAPTER VIII.
CUSTOMS CONNECTED WITH PREGNANCY AND CHILD-BEARING.
The Couvade, its Prevalence in Savage and Civilized Lands.—Pregnant Women excluded from Kitchens.—The Deities of the Lying-in Chamber.
Dr. Tylor113 gives the following account of the Carib couvade in the West Indies from the work of Du Tertre:114—
“When a child is born, the mother goes presently to her work, but the father begins to complain, and takes to his hammock, and there he is visited as though he were sick, and undergoes a course of dieting which would cure of the gout the most replete of Frenchmen. How they can fast so much and not die of it,” continues the narrator, “is amazing to me, for they sometimes pass the five first days without eating or drinking anything, then up to the tenth they drink oÜycou, which has about as much nourishment in it as beer. These ten days passed, they begin to eat cassava only, drinking oÜycou, and abstaining from everything else for the space of a whole month. During this time, however, they only eat the inside of the cassava, so that what is left is like the rim of a hat when the block has been taken out, and all the cassava rims they keep for the feast at the end of forty days, hanging them up in the house with the cord. When the forty days are up they invite their relations and best friends, who being arrived, before they set to eating, hack the skin of this poor wretch with agouti-teeth, and draw blood from all parts of his body in such sort that from being sick by pure imagination they often make a real patient of him. This is, however, so to speak, only the fish, for now comes the sauce they prepare for him; they take sixty or eighty large grains of pimento or Indian pepper, the strongest they can get, and after well washing it in water they wash with this peppery infusion the wounds and scars of the poor fellow, who I believe suffers no less than if he were burnt alive; however, he must not utter a single word if he will not pass for a coward and a wretch. This ceremony finished, they bring him back to his bed, where he remains some days more, and the rest go and make good cheer in the house at his expense. Nor is this all; for through the space of six whole months he eats neither birds nor fish, firmly believing that this would injure the child’s stomach, and that it would participate in the natural faults of the animals on which its father had fed; for example, if the father ate turtle, the child would be deaf and have no brains like this animal, if he ate manati, the child would have little round eyes like this creature, and so on with the rest. It seems that this very severe fasting is only for the first child, that for the others being slight.”
Among the Arawaks of Surinam a father must kill no large game for some time after his child is born. When a wife has borne a child, amongst the Abipones, the husband is put to bed and well wrapped up and kept as though he had had the child. Among the Land Dayaks of Borneo, after the birth of his child the father is kept in seclusion indoors for several days and dieted on rice and salt to prevent the child’s stomach from swelling. All this is due to a belief in a bodily union between father and child; different persons with these savages are not necessarily separate beings.
Tylor says115 that Venegas mentions the couvade among the Indians of California; Zuccheli in West Africa; Captain Van der Hart in Bouro, in the Eastern Archipelago; and Marco Polo in Eastern Asia in the thirteenth century. In Europe even in modern times it existed in the neighbourhood of the Pyrenees. Strabo said,116 that among the Iberians of the North of Spain, the women, after the birth of a child, tend their husbands, putting them to bed instead of going themselves. Among the Basques, says Michel, “in valleys whose population recalls in its usages the infancy of society, the women rise immediately after childbirth and attend to the duties of the household, while the husband goes to bed, taking the baby with him, and thus receives the neighbours’ compliments.” Diodorus Siculus mentions the same thing of the Corsicans (v. 14). Hudibras says,117—
“For though Chineses go to bed
And lie in, in their ladies’ stead,
And, for the pains they took before,
Are nurs’d and pamper’d to do more.”
On this remarks Dr. Zachary Grey118:—
“The Chinese men of quality, when their wives are brought to bed, are nursed and tended with as much care as women here, and are supplied with the best strengthening and nourishing diet in order to qualify them for future services.” This is the custom of the Brazilians, if we may believe Masseus, who observes, “that women in travail are delivered without great difficulty, and presently go about their household business: the husband in her stead keepeth his bed, is visited by his neighbours, hath his broths made him, and junkets sent to comfort him.”
“Among the Iroquois, a mother who shrieks during her labour is forbidden to bear other children, and some of the South American Indians killed the children of the mothers who shrieked, from the belief that they will grow up to be cowards.”119
The origin of the couvade is not to be traced to the father and mother, says Starcke; it has to do simply with the well-being of the child. The father’s powers of endurance, tested so severely as we have seen, are believed to be assured to the child.120
Max MÜller traces the origin of the couvade to the derision of friends of both sexes.
Dobrizhoffen says of the Abipones:121 “They comply with this custom with the greater care and readiness because they believe that the father’s rest and abstinence have an extraordinary effect on the well-being of new-born infants, and is, indeed, absolutely necessary for them. For they are quite convinced that any unseemly act on the father’s part would injuriously affect the child on account of the sympathetic tie which naturally subsists between them, so that in the event of the child’s death the women all blame the self-indulgence of the father, and find fault with this or that act.”
Badaga nursing-women physic themselves with ashes and pieces of sweet-flag (Acorus calamus), an aromatic plant, with the idea of communicating medicinal properties to the milk. They also administer to the baby assafoetida and a certain sacred confection taken from the entrails of a bull and similar to the bezoar stones so celebrated in the middle ages.122
The Badaga folk do not permit a pregnant woman to enter the room where the provisions are kept and the fireplace stands; it would be feared that her condition, her supposed uncleanness, might lessen the virtues of the fire or diminish the nutritious value of the food.123
Pliny says, “there is no limit to the marvellous powers attributed to females.”124 At certain times, according to him, a woman can scare away hailstorms, whirlwinds, and lightnings, by going about in scanty costume. If she walk round a field of wheat at such times, the caterpillars, worms, beetles, and other vermin will fall from the ears of corn. If she touch “young vines, they are irremediably injured, and both rue and ivy, plants possessed of highly medicinal virtues, will die instantly upon being touched by her.” Bees, he says, will forsake their hives if she touches them, linen boiling in a cauldron will turn black, and the edge of a razor will become blunted. The bitumen that is found in JudÆa will yield to nothing but this, and Tacitus says the same thing. Marvellous to say, poisonous and injurious as Pliny and other writers, and even popular belief at the present day, consider the catamenial fluid to be, a host of writers on medical and magical subjects have attributed certain remedial properties to it. Pliny says it is useful, as a topical application, for gout, the bite of a mad dog (what has not been recommended for this!), for tertian or quartan fevers and for epilepsy. Reduced to ashes and mixed with soot and wax, it is a cure for ulcers upon all kinds of beasts of burden; mixed in the same way with oil of roses and applied to the forehead, it cured the migraine of Roman ladies. Applied to the doorposts, it neutralises all the spells of the magicians—a set of men which even the credulous Pliny characterizes as the most lying in existence.
Both savages and classical peoples had the same curious notions about the touch of catamenial women. There may possibly be some foundation in bacteriology to account for them.
St. Augustine says:125 “The woman in child-bed must have three gods to look to her after her deliverance, lest Sylvanus come in the night and torment her: in signification whereof, three men must go about the house in the night, and first strike the thresholds with an hatchet, then with a pestle, and then sweep them with besoms, that by these signs of worship they may keep Sylvanus out.”
Lying-in women in Germany in the seventeenth century were simply crammed with food about every two hours, and they seem to have taken no harm from the practice.
