PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS. 171 



creed. And we are shown how, consequently, there yet remains a 

 place for priestly action in medical treatment. 



Let me add a more remarkable mode in which the primitive 

 theory has persisted. The notion that the demon who was caus- 

 ing a disease must be driven out, continued, until recent times, to 

 give a character to medical practice, and even now influences the 

 conceptions which many people form of medicines. The primi- 

 tive medicine-man, thinking to make the body an intolerable 

 habitat for the demon, exposed his patient to this or that kind of 

 alarming, painful, or disgusting treatment. He made before him 

 dreadful noises and fearful grimaces, or subjected him to an 

 almost unbearable heat, or produced under his nose atrocious 

 stenches, or made him swallow the most abominable substances 

 he could think of. As we saw in the case cited from Ecclesias- 

 ticus, the idea, even among the semi-civilized Hebrews, long re- 

 mained of this nature. Now there is abundant proof that, not 

 only during mediaeval days but in far more recent days, the effi- 

 ciency of medicines was associated in thought with their disgust- 

 ingness : the more repulsive they were the more effectual. Hence 

 Montaigne's ridicule of the monstrous compounds used by doctors 

 in his day " dung of elephant, the left foot of a tortoise, liver of 

 a mole, powdered excrement of rats, etc." Hence a receipt given 

 in Vicarie's Treasure of Anatomy (1641) " Five spoonfuls of 

 knave child urine of an innocent." Hence " the beliefs that epi- 

 lepsy may be cured by drinking water out of the skull of a sui- 

 cide or by tasting the blood of a murderer ; " that " moss growing 

 on a human skull, if dried, powdered, and taken as snuff, will 

 cure the headache ; " and that the halter and chips from the 

 gibbet on which malefactors have been executed or exposed have 

 medicinal properties. And there prevails in our own days among 

 the uncultured and the young a similarly-derived notion. They 

 betray an ingrained mental association between the nastiness of a 

 medicine and its efficiency : so much so, indeed, that a medicine 

 which is pleasant is with difficulty believed to be a medicine. 



As with evolution at large, as with organic evolution, and as 

 with social evolution throughout its other divisions, secondary 

 differentiations accompany the primary differentiation. "While 

 the medical agency separates from the ecclesiastical agency, there 

 go on separations within the medical agency itself. 



The most pronounced division is that between physicians and 

 surgeons. The origin of this has been confused in various ways, 

 and seems now the more obscure because there has been of late 

 arising not a further distinction between the two but a fusion of 

 them. All along they have had a common function in the treat- 

 ment of ordinary disorders and in the uses of drugs; and the 



