The Eternal Search: The Story of Man and His Drugs

By Richard R. Mathison

A kaleidoscopic survey of the lore and legend of the World’s drugs and medicines.

This unique and delightful anecdotal history of drugs and medicines pursues the important doctrines of medicine down through the centuries. Provides fascinating data on some of the by-paths, and it traces the old wives' tale to their origins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: Apr 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839743504

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© Barakaldo Books 2020, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE ETERNAL SEARCH

THE STORY OF MAN AND HIS DRUGS

BY

RICHARD R. MATHISON

This symbol goes back to 5,000 years ago when Egyptians used drawings of the Eye of Horus as magic amulets to ward off disease. By the Middle Ages, the symbol was modified to a sign much like our figure 4. Alchemists and physicians scribbled it on formulas as an invocation to the planet Jupiter. Slowly, it was modified to . Today, it remains on prescriptions—a reminder of those distant days when sorcery and superstition ruled the drug mixers’ ways.

Table of Contents

Contents

Table of Contents 5

Preface 6

1. The Evil Eye 7

2. The Winds of Doctrine 15

3. Fruits of the Earth 23

4. Gold In Physick.... 35

5. Rods Made Gold 63

6. A Louse for Aching Eyes 70

7. Moss from a Dead Man’s Skull 83

8. Food: ...A Very Odd Thing.... 91

9. One Drop of Poison 100

10. The Stage of Fools 111

11. How Can He Be Clean...? 123

12. The House of Pain 129

13. Prodigious Pestilence 137

14. The French Disease 144

15. The High Cost of Purging 151

16. The Houris of Heaven 160

17. To Cheat as Tradesmen or Fail as Fools 168

18. It Cures Anything that Ails You! 176

19. Nemo Seco! Stale Tomatoes! 188

20. An Expensive Painted Lady 198

21. For a Desirable, Lifelike Appearance 208

22. Quick, Watson...the Needle! 214

23. To Bedlam with Him!... 228

24. Promises for the Future 238

Biographies 241

Bibliography and Acknowledgments 243

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 246

Preface

THERE are certain premeditated effronteries in this book. Some decorous readers may be scandalized by the recounting of weird and sordid sex practices. The squeamish may be sickened by the vile and frightening medical vogues of the past. Some physicians may prefer that the old faults and frailties of their profession be forgotten. Some religious groups may be appalled by references to past stupidities and cruelties of their faith.

This is not a textbook. It offers no panaceas. It makes no effort to censor the doings of our forefathers. It is not a flattering nor a pretty tale. It recounts old lies, gossip, and quackeries as well as truth, facts, and acts of great devotion and integrity.

If this volume has any purpose, it is to warn against the dangers of self-satisfaction and dogmatism. It is to remind us that our past rules our future. All this happened. All this is happening now. We shall, no doubt, seem as superstitious and strange to generations to come.

1. The Evil Eye

...let us not boast, lest some Evil Eye should put to flight the word which I am going to speak.

—Plato, Phaedo

THE protagonists of these tales are no mere mortals.

They are, first, the elements and ores of the earth which combine in poetic and glorious ways.

Secondly, there are the weird and wonderful vegetables which have eased man’s tribulations and, misused, added to man’s burdens.

Thirdly, there are the parts of man and animals—the fat and bone, the blood and secretions.

Before man knew fire, he had grubbed for roots which, he realized through his dim perceptions, not only nourished but also soothed or excited him. The ways of animals were his ways. Perhaps he learned from them, the animals, by observing. As century moved into century, these bits of bark and leaf and fruit took on meaning. Some killed, some healed, some offered momentary peace or even an occasional magnificent glimpse into another realm. The salt lick filled a deep craving; devouring the heart of a brave, vanquished foe gave courage; the betel nut soothed. And so the deep and majestic marvels unfolded slowly, as nature reluctantly gave up her secrets to men brave or curious enough to seek them out.

Ever so slowly, it was found that these mystic substances produced even more startling results when combined. So the herbalist and soothsayer came into being, and the conjurer and wizard became a leader in the tribe.

Nearly all of these dim and forgotten remedies were, by modern-day standards, hopeless nonsense. Many were used as amulets and charms. Some killed. Some were harmless. Some, perhaps, even helped. Yet they offered hope, and hence, sometimes cured patients who believed. And so the faint beginnings of what we, today, call psychosomatic medicine—still the greatest medical mystery of all—came about. To throw a virgin into a fire seems hideous—or, perhaps, only wasteful—to the sophisticated modern. Yet can contemporary man, in his world of fetish and dogmatic self-esteem, really judge? There is no way to reckon how many pagan worshipers walked away from a sacrifice, renewed in faith and self-assured, because the gods had been pacified. Would such a man not be braver in battle, wiser in decision, more clever on the hunt?

The long search for relief on the couch of pain is fraught with superstition and hokum. Much as future generations will marvel at our quaint and curious ways, we can chuckle at our forefathers’ absurd notion that a brass ring warded off the rheum or that a bit of fat from a camel’s hump made him a rascal to reckon with in the bedchamber. Yet what of today’s booming sales in chlorophyll tooth paste, crowded mineral springs, bustling colonic mills, the vogue of vitamin pills, and the shouts of the faith healers? And what of witchcraft? Civilizations perish and emerge, but the sorcerer—in one form or another—is ever-active. No advocate of spiritualism asks proof; no follower of Mary Baker Eddy would ask for statistical verification. The newspapers carry reports of superstitious natives wasting away under the curse of a hex in Haiti, Africa, or Timbuktu. In our own country, production-line efficiency goes up when canned music is put in a factory; in primitive lands, people die when they think it is time.

The meaningfulness of all this was clearly shown in the South-west a few short years ago. Modern scientific method clashed with witchcraft—and lost. The Navajo, before the arrival of the white man, knew exactly what to do if he came down with a touch of dyspepsia. He yelled for the tribal medicine man, told his wife to summon his kinsfolk, and retired to groan in his hogan. When the medicine man arrived, he poured a traditional sand painting, which was a specific for the diagnosed ailment, and rolled his patient atop it. Meanwhile, the gathered clan outside the hogan slaughtered goats, feasted, and gossiped.

White doctors discarded such nonsense. The sick Indian was bundled off to the reservation hospital and dosed with wonder drugs. Unhappily, many did not respond. Annoyed and puzzled, the doctors finally capitulated. The tribal medicine man returned. Today, it is not unusual to enter a gleaming ward to find an aged Navajo resting under penicillin treatment while, just beneath the high hospital bed, a wrinkle-faced medicine man pours out his age-old sand painting on the linoleum floor. Reportedly, science and sorcery combined have wrought a respectable percentage of cures.

Are these only the gullible ways of superstitious primitives? It is interesting to chart the results of some recent experiments with a placebo, meaning an ineffective injection of saline solution or a sugar pill. At the Yale Laboratory of Applied Science, an investigator gave milk sugar to 199 sufferers of acute, periodic headaches, along with three conventional drugs for headache. The standard drugs brought relief in 84 per cent of the cases, but the sugar pills cured 52 per cent of the victims. In another test, cocaine, morphine, and saline solution all worked equally well in killing pain. Sugar pills also cured 44 per cent of the patients suffering from seasickness. People stricken with the excruciating pain of angina pectoris found relief from pain 40 per cent of the time when given saline solution, while the best-known drug for the pain relieved 58 per cent.

As it is fashionable today to discount magic as hokum, we also view the sorcerers and Magi of yesteryear as wily charlatans. Yet cures by their incantations and spells must have left many impressed with their wondrous powers. And, if their efforts against the unseen evildoer failed, would it be nothing but verification of the demon’s malignant powers?

The first stirrings in man’s mind of what was to become today’s science are recorded in ancient tablets and writings from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia. A maze of superstitions, gods, demons, and ceremonies cast their shadows over that distant age. They feared the evil eye and took precautions against it, much as primitives do today. They cast wax images of their enemies and stuck pins in them, as the followers of voodoo do today. Chaldean priests of over 2,000 years ago read messages in the shape of trees, the intestines of animals, and the movement of serpents. In the Book of Ezekiel there is mention of divination by arrows, the early forerunner of water witching. The study of the stars and numbers brought on the beginnings of astrology, the harlot mother of science. Centuries later, Kepler was to find one of the great secrets of the universe during his fruitless search for a premise of astrology—that there is a single law which unifies the universe.

Today a few hundred thousand Parsis in India and Persia continue the ancient magical rituals of those distant days, the remnants of a once great religio-magical force. Yet scholars say that their belief, Zoroastrianism, was to serve as the cornerstone for many of today’s Christian concepts. Hebrew sages, becoming acquainted with the teachings of Zoroaster, brought the tenets to their own faith, which was to serve later as a base for Christianity.

Just as magic has cast its spell on today’s science and theology, so it has influenced law. Evil demons were, for centuries, driven from afflicted bodies by nauseous drinks, whipping, and torture. To believe that the sorcerer’s major concern was in curing the patient is to belittle his role as a tribal leader. He was the chosen delegate to warn the demon that, whenever he appeared, he would be given a similarly brutal reception. This concept finds expression in modern jurisprudence. As Lord Halifax wisely observed some years ago, Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen. Today’s capital punishment is more than society’s revenge against a wrongdoer; it is a warning to other man-demons that the same fate awaits them should they stray.

The belief that certain demons attacked certain parts of the body was a by-product of polytheism. Records show that the ancient Egyptian recognized thirty-six separate demons and divinities in the air. Each worked on a different part of the body, for good or evil. The concept that the priest-sorcerer must evoke more than the godhead to cure was not confined to the Middle East. The Maori of New Zealand, like the Navajo, believed that certain demons attacked certain organs. The Huron’s concept could well receive the endorsement of today’s psychiatrists; there were three kinds of disease, they believed—the natural, cured by natural means, the spells cast by sorcerers, and the ailments caused by a sick soul, seeking something.

While the vast nebula of superstition swirled for centuries about the heads of our forebears, certain ideas caught their imaginations and emerged as classics in the world of magic. Typical was the legendary Secrets of Solomon. This great king had reputedly discovered the magical cure for all disease. He compiled his formula for mankind before his death. But Hezekiah, fearing that his people might pray to gods other than Jehovah, hid the formula. A few powerful families, however, knew and kept the formula, passing it on to new generations by word of mouth. Josephus tells of a Jew who pulled a demon from the nose of an ailing person in the court of Emperor Vespasian (A.D. 9-79) by using a magic ring. To convince the assemblage of the demon’s reality, the wizard had the monster tip over a jug of water.

The Jews’ early reputation as masters of magic lived on. In the Book of Enoch we find reference to the women who were instructed in incantations, exorcisms and the cutting of roots. The Talmud, too, is filled with magic formulas. They carried forward, too, the ancient beliefs of the Mesopotamians. These ancient people hated the fly, with good cause, as science has shown. They erected an evil statue with a fly’s head. In the Old Testament this ancient hate appears in the passage: Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savor. Today, it finds expression in the phrase: A fly in the ointment.

The Greeks and Romans believed in the Jews’ magic powers, and Jewish dream sellers were commonplace in Rome’s market place. During the hectic days of Christianity’s first feeling of power, the Jew was herded into a ghetto—as befitted an unbeliever—and confined to certain unimportant functions, including moneylending, science, art, and sorcery. As evils descended, it was quite natural to blame the disasters on the Jews’ knowledge of the black arts. They were persecuted more for exerting their occult powers for evil.

Today, in the East, the Jew is still considered a conjurer and mystic. Aged, wandering healers, called Gabbetes, still attend the sick, using dog dung, dew from Mount Carmel, earthworms, and invocations to heal the sick.

A remnant of the Jews’ ancient preoccupation with magic is the wearing of phylacteries during orthodox services. These leather receptacles, worn on the forehead and left arm, are literal protections against demons, as suggested in Exodus and Deuteronomy.

Fear of demons has not disappeared. In the latest Rituale Romanum, the official instruction book for Catholic priests, there are detailed passages dealing with the recognition of people possessed by demons, and ceremonies for the priest to use to free them from diabolic possession.

Another magic classic is the old incantation, abracadabra, still used by magicians at Lions Club smokers. Its likely origin is in the old Hebrew phrase Abrak-ha-dabra, meaning I bless the deed. During Rome’s glory it was peddled on every street corner as a cure-all. The device was to write it on a paper, taking one letter from the end each time in the line below, until it ended, with the single letter a and formed an inverted triangle. The three points of the written charm, some authorities say, signified, the Trinity in Unity, a concept that goes back far before the Christian era. The charm was tied in flax and worn around the neck for nine days, then thrown by the wearer over his shoulder into a stream running eastward, and the patient was cured. It is still as effective today for the common cold as any of the modern wonder drugs.

If this charm did not work, one could always buy lion’s fat or yellow coral. For the wealthy, green emeralds wrapped in catskin and worn around the neck was the remedy for a fever. Other talismans sold in Rome’s market place included the warty excrescences from the forelegs of certain animals, dill to hold in the left hand, turtle blood, and various stones. Many of these cures were based on sympathetic medicine—that like attracts like—and the amulet was reputed to capture the disease. This ancient idea—extremely popular with the early Saxons—called for the amulet to be buried after it had worked its cure. This concept, merging with other primitive superstitions, was to form the basis for the theory of the transference of disease.

The noted physicians of the times all had special magic amulets. The Roman chronicler Pliny says of one root that it will cure fever only if the patient’s name and his parents’ names are said aloud while it is being dug. For colic, Alexander of Tralles recommends wolf dung and bone worn in a closed tube on the right arm. Henbane has had a long career as a magical medicament. It was to be gathered before sunset, when the moon was in Aquarius or Pisces, with the thumb and third finger of the left hand, while the name of the patient was chanted. It would bring the worm out of the tooth or cure gout. Another old Greek idea, still popular in backwoods America, was to rub a toad on a wart, which would fall off. The Roman hung red coral about his neck to ward off the evil eye. When Edward II’s son was taken with smallpox, he was placed in a room hung with red cloth and was cured. Because flannel was so often dyed red in later years, it became associated in man’s mind with the talisman of red material. Today, many a mother will swear by flannel as the only cloth to wrap around a sore throat, little realizing that this practice has its roots in the old idea that the color red frightened off evil spirits.

The value of the fish for nutrition as brain food and for household cures has always attracted the Western World. Its mythical powers came with the dawn of Christianity. Since ichthys consists of initials for the Greek words for Jesus Christ, Our Savior, it became a secret symbol for early Christians and lived on as a magic sign.

Many magic symbols found their way into later centuries. Pepys notes in 1667: My wife went down with Jane and W. Hewer to Woolwich in order to get a little ayre, and to lie there tonight and so to gather May Dew tomorrow morning, which Mrs. Turner hath taught her is the only thing to wash her face with; and I am content with it.

Catherine de Medici wore a piece of infant’s skin as a charm. Lord Byron gave such a charm to a prince. Charles V carried dried silkworms as a cure for dizzy spells. Emperor Augustus wore the skin of a sea calf to protect himself from lightning. Green jasper cut in the shape of a dragon, an amulet which was popular 600 years before Christ, was a cure for indigestion. American Indians carried their bags of charms—often inherited from their fathers—into battle. Numerous silver and gold charms were worn through the ages.

The world is far from done with superstitious amulets. Thousands of Saint Christopher medals (he’s the patron saint of travellers) are sold to Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Arabian women today wear about their necks silver cases which contain texts from the Koran, written before sunset on a Friday with ink in which myrrh and saffron have been mixed. Mail-order entrepreneurs still do a bustling trade in magic rings and various talismans. The Mormon Church still favors blessed, holy underwear. The believer wears it constantly, taking baths with one hand still holding the soiled suit and not removing it until the cloth of the new touches his skin. And few of the hacks who turn out B-grade war movies fail to have the heroic aviator die after he has lost his lucky scarf or mascot.

Another hoary idea which has been universal deals with hair and nails. The ancient Hindu book of antidemoniac lore, the Vendidad, tells of the dire consequences of leaving nail parings or cut hair lying about. If they fall into the hands of wizards, anything can happen. Many French peasants continue today to bury their cut hair and mark the place. This is based on the idea of material resurrection on Judgment Day. The owner, when he returns, knows where to collect the hair. Chilean Gauchos, too, hide their hair and nail parings. In Belgium and Ireland many people hide their hair in tree trunks.

This concern for hair has led, too, to the belief that being shorn is an act of purification. Soldiers have always been shorn. Today, the Marine boot is clipped, theoretically to be sure he is sanitary but actually to announce to him and the world that he has been purified and is starting a new life. During the Middle Ages this same idea mingles with Christianity, and it was common to clip the head of a witch before she stood trial. That the primitive idea is far from dead was evidenced in Paris after World War II. Patriots had a field day shaving the heads of women who had been consorting with German soldiers.

Another curious outgrowth of the belief in hair and nails as tools for the sorcerer found expression in the idea that women’s hair, buried in horse dung, would turn into snakes. Paracelsus, the famed physician, viewed this as nonsense long before the idea of spontaneous generation was finally discredited. His observation was summed up in his words: Nihil est sine spermate. (Nothing exists without sperm.) But it was centuries later that the idea was discarded by science, and it still lingers as popular folklore in some backward areas.

The heyday of magic came, of course, with the upsurge of hysteria over witchcraft. Today, we pity the sorry unfortunates who were tortured or were killed during the panic. There is constant allusion to those days in contemporary politics and ethics. Yet, as Will James observed, As long as people believe in ghosts there are ghosts. In a world where most of mankind believed in the power of witchcraft, it is obvious that there were witches. It is of small concern that today we would tab such hysteria with a psychiatric label and bundle them off to the back ward of a mental hospital, rather than burn them atop a pile of faggots. The charges of witchcraft contain much false accusation and nonsense. This is of sociological significance, but it has little bearing on the fact that witches were able, by suggestion, to render other hysterics helpless and even kill them with their curses.

These self-convinced witches undoubtedly wrought their havoc on other believers in witchcraft. They also met in rites and ceremonies. Too many of the musty documents give vivid, detailed description of witches’ sabbaths, by both accused witches and observers, to discard them casually as sheer poppycock. Let us picture, for a moment, such a meeting.

A lonely and frustrated woman—a type of hysterical and suggestible person that has inhabited every society since the world began—begins to see manifestations of the Devil. Brooding over the occult world, she soon believes she can put the evil eye on enemies. In the darkness of the lonely night, there are signs which can only be interpreted as a visitation by His Satanic Majesty. She seeks out other sorcerers. They talk of their incantations and charms. More and more, her life revolves around her imagined powers. The Devil can be heard more often about her house. She goes to a meeting of witches. She drinks of a caldron of brew which contains all the conventional substances of song and story—toad and bat blood and, also, belladonna. As the excitement grows, the poor, numbed and frantic creature may see the Devil appear as she dances wildly about.

Drugged and mad with the fury of the event, she revels in the orgy of sex and freedom. Later, perhaps, she announces to an enemy that he is under a curse. The suggestion is enough. The victim begins to lose weight and cannot eat or sleep. She is caught. Before the inquisition she tells of her sordid meetings with the Devil, of her sexual encounters with demons, of flying through the air on a broomstick. She implicates others. The excitement grows. By the time she is executed, there are thirty witches who, under torture, have confessed. And the hysteria mushrooms on and on.

Today there are few remnants of those frantic times. Because the witch broom was reputedly made from hazel-tree wood, we still find witch hazel on the druggist’s shelf. Spiritualists still practice levitation and recount stories of subjects who soar in chairs like the witches of old. A few of the old brews have come down to us. While most of the substances are without significance, the plants that yield digitalis and belladonna (deadly nightshade and foxglove) were also used. Today, a person who truly believes in the occult can still meet with horned demons when under the influence of these drugs.

Many of the world’s odious and archaic mixtures—once the tools of the magus and sorcerer—have been forgotten, lost in antiquity. They have been discarded as tribes moved to new locales where a need disappeared or a particular plant did not grow. Others became taboo as primitive theologies changed. Still others were guided to obscurity by the fortunes of war. As various concepts of healing clashed and refined themselves, others were dispensed with or modified. Still others, forgotten and then rediscovered, found their way from the conjurer’s bag into the modern pharmacopoeia. Synthesized, refined, purified, and limitlessly combined, they still challenge and puzzle.

They came from many places. A few came from the bubbling witch’s kettle of song and story. Others found meaning on the sacrificial altars of the Aztec gods. Still others appeared in the medicine chest of the Hittite armies and in the sun-swept temples of the Egyptian Pharaohs. The alchemist used many of them in his futile search for the philosophers’ stone, and Caesar’s legions used others on the fields of Gaul.

All but a tiny fraction of man’s early medicine was fraud and nonsense. Yet there is the thread. Was it mystic insight that made man decide that the pituitary gland was the seat of the soul centuries ago? Why they selected this insignificant nodule for so glorious a function, we shall never know, yet today, certainly by their theological standards, one is a devil or a man according to the state of his pituitary.

Faint and forgotten, or even as yet uncovered, there is the thread in the warp and woof of history. Marvels and miracles, nostrums and nonsense, cannibalism and cathartics—where is the dividing line?

As in all the tides of men—as the strategist of atomic war learns from the tactics of Genghis Khan—so these distant quackeries must not be discarded too lightly.

There is a moral to the great pageantry of drugs; it is that man must never unquestioningly accept the old simply because it is old. Neither must he blandly follow strange cults and blindly accept and advocate new theories as final truth.

Man has come a long way since he purged the black bile of the Devil from newborn babes with tearing cathartics and sacrificed his herds to placate the gods.

He has come a long way.

And he has a long way to go.

2. The Winds of Doctrine

Carried about with every wind of doctrine.

—New Testament, Ephesians

THE American today lives in an elaborate economic philosophy of obsolescence. The new must replace the old. The unworn must be replaced with the unused. As a people living forever in the future and with eternal optimism, we are particularly vulnerable to this heady propaganda.

Medicine is not immune to this culture. It feels the impact as keenly as does the disk jockey or rag trade. Each week some new wonder of medicine is heralded in the public press. Those that catch the public fancy bear the fruit of demand and, hence, receive funds to investigate further. Now and again, an important medical milestone comes from all this.

In man’s eternal search for curious substances which ease pain or cure or prevent sickness, there have been many such milestones. When they come, the hero is briefly lauded, his name is inscribed in the history book, and life moves on. Yet seldom are they discoveries in the proper sense. They are usually the revival of some ancient and forgotten lore or the refinements of a crude belief of centuries past.

The marvelous advance by Alexander Fleming was typical. In his tiny pathological laboratory he wondered why bacteria did not grow in an area surrounding a certain mold. Every bacteriologist had observed it a hundred times. Every housewife had seen the same situation on her jars of jam. The ancient Egyptians, drinking raw beer for their health, had tasted the same molds long centuries ago. But Fleming asked, Why?

Was there something seeping from the edges of the colony which kept bacteria from growing? He set to work. Today we have penicillin, which has probably saved millions of lives. Fleming’s name will fade into the obscure paragraphs of medical histories, his work will be forgotten, while we take public subscriptions to erect monuments to new generals. But we must accept all this. For man’s first business is war. Lifesaving is still an underpaid and thankless chore.

Lister, in demanding cleanliness at the operating table, was only echoing the voices of many men who had gone before, but his voice had authority, and the time was ripe some hundred years ago.

Pasteur’s germ discovery was again but proof of what had been stated by the Babylonian stargazers long centuries before. Surely, when the preventive or easy remedy for that vague category of symptoms called neoplastic growths, or cancer, finally comes, it will have been said before.

Over the centuries the men of medicine have led their patients down strange byways. They have struggled constantly to build lasting and dogmatic rules which will not fail, only to have them shattered by some lone heretic puttering with his flasks. All too often they have ignored his advance and burned him at the stake for his trouble. Yet, again, they have turned their heads to listen—if the voice carried authority, or if it was time to listen.

The men of medicine must not be criticized for this, for with the doctrine that every voice must be heard comes medical anarchy. History will never know how many gullible patients have been murdered in recent years by ruthless quacks and fumbling opportunists who have based their cases on the shrill cry: Look how the doctors ignored Pasteur.

The manipulation of the materials of the earth as medicines started, no doubt, with pain itself. Early man had an instinctive pharmacy. He sought cold water when he had fevers and licked his wounds, as an animal does, to cleanse them with his spittle.

Slowly, magic grew out of the dim association between pain and the substances which eased it. Plants and animals were recognized for certain qualities. Undoubtedly, the tree, soaring high above man, was a majestic inspiration, for trees play a significant role in the oldest known tales of many cultures. Buddha’s meditation beneath a tree, the magic trees of the druids, our own tale of Adam and Eve and the tree in the Garden of Eden, ancient Nordic myths—all use the symbol. Today, the age-old Scandinavian custom of hanging a sick person’s clothes on a tree to hasten the cure still survives.

Later, the soothsayers looked to the stars for signs, read meaning into natural changes of weather or catastrophe, and studied the viscera of animals. The drawing of symbols, dances, painting of the body, and pleas to early godheads followed. Even later, such crude concepts as the evil eye, possession by spirits (as in insanity), and emanation of evil humors by the sick (as in contagion) came into being. Roots, berries, fruits, barks, and herbs took on added significance. That this superstitious therapy, crude as it might have been, was based on sound observation is evident in the findings of one anthropologist who studied the peoples of the Amazon. Out of 144 such primitive remedies used by the tribes, 59 can be found in today’s pharmacopoeia. There is evidence, too, that the primitives used, at various times, such modern measures as purges, emetics, liquid diets, and a practice that revolutionized modern medicine only a few decades ago—cleanliness in treating wounds.

These concepts of cure did not stand alone. They cross-fertilized themselves with all of man’s doings—trade and barter, religion, the daily hunt for food, shelter, and superstition. Out of all these centuries of search came what we now call the scientific method, the best system yet devised, we are told, to unlock the mysteries of our universe. Yet, in essence, it is but a tiny step past savage mysticism, subject to all the flaws of human observation, at the whim of our limited senses and rigid conclusions.

Many believe it is the end and all, the only approach to solving our complex questions. But it is better to think of it as only a rung in the ladder, for it is well to remember that the wily witch doctor, the alchemist, the stargazer, and the lordly practitioner swirling his urine flask and diagnosing from it believed that they, too, had found the only true path to truth. And, perhaps, they were on one of the paths to truth. We know today that the soothsayer’s crude psychotherapy was not without significance, but we shy from exploring this significance. We are still a culture too closely allied to the ways of witchcraft not to bristle with fear and anger when asked to study it calmly. Yet that is the reason why it is important for us to pause now and again and look back at what has gone before. Look at these ways with contempt and scorn if you will, but, as you do, remember that ancient Chinese warriors cleansed wounds with sterile urine while, until a few years ago, our own forefathers died from infections. Remember that the Hindu mystic calmed the mentally ill with Rauwolfia centuries ago, while we,