MAGICAL MEDICAL PRACTISE 165 



MAGICAL MEDICAL PRACTISE IN SOUTH CAROLINA 



BY JOHN HAWKINS 



AS chemistry began in alchemy and astronomy in astrology, so 

 medicine, to a great extent, has grown out of magic. Its first 

 professors were sorcerers and priests ; and its beginnings are to be looked 

 for in the juggleries and mummeries of holy men and women who, by 

 fastings, narcotics, or other means, enabled themselves to communicate 

 with the benignant or malevolent spirits which savage philosophy finds 

 in every object of nature. Among rude peoples the physician is often 

 a priest and always a magician. 



Alchemy is dead and astrology as it exists to-day is no longer to be 

 considered seriously by the student of culture; but, owing perhaps to 

 the religious factor in its origin, the science of medicine, as it is under- 

 stood by a very large number of persons, is still encumbered with the 

 dead husks of its earliest growth. Even in the most enlightened coun- 

 tries physicians are constantly confronted with the idea that disease is 

 a sort of demoniacal possession which is to be relieved by prayer, or 

 that it is some mysterious entity which can be removed only by the use 

 of some equally mysterious remedy. Charms, medals impregnated 

 with virtue by ecclesiastical benediction, and so-called electric and 

 galvanic belts, pads, rings, brushes and other appliances are sold by 

 thousands; and patent panaceas, compounded of drugs brought from 

 strange lands or discovered in some unusual way, are bought and used 

 by millions of credulous and afflicted persons in all parts of the world. 



In view of these facts it is not remarkable that one occasionally 

 finds in the United States, as well as in secluded nooks of the Old 

 World, regions in which superstitious medical practises, handed down 

 from father to son for no one knows how many hundreds of years, not 

 only survive, but also show an astonishing degree of vitality. 



Such a region occurs in the central part of South Carolina. It is 

 a strip of country about one hundred miles long and from thirty to fifty 

 miles wide, lying along the Santee, the Congaree, Broad and Saluda 

 rivers, and embracing parts of the counties of Orangeburg, Lexington, 

 Newberry and Saluda. The early European settlers of this region 

 were Germans who came, about the middle of the eighteenth century, 

 from the Lower Palatinate, Baden, Wiirtemberg and Switzerland. At 

 a little later date small groups and isolated families of Scotch-Irish, 

 of English and of French from the Huguenot settlements of the coast 

 region established themselves among these peasants from the banks of 

 the Rhine. But, broadly speaking, this part of Carolina was in the 



