Truth in Falsehood Strange as these and other old notions appear to 

 us today, it is not fair to laugh at them. For one thing, what people with 

 queer notions think seems to them just as reasonable as our thoughts do to 

 us. For anodier thing, we have ourselves at some time held views sincerely 

 and very earnestly only to abandon them later. But most important is the 

 possibility that there is at least a small grain of truth in queer notions. For 

 example, one could say that the notion that evil spirits cause disease is true 

 if we only substitute microbes for spirits, although these "spirits" cannot be 

 driven out by beating drums, or burning incense, or eating bitter herbs. 

 Again, though we reject the "humors" of the ancients, we know that the 

 hormones have important bearings upon health; but we do not remedy an 

 imbalance of these juices by the methods employed by the ancients. 



"COME TO THE EGG. COME, LITTLE PAINS, INTO THE EGG," SAID TRINI^ 



There are witch-doctors and magic healers in nearly every community. The magic 

 ideas have the advantage of appealing to "common sense", so that the patient hcs 

 confidence in the healer. Certainly these ideas cannot be disproved. They have the 

 disadvantage that they cannot be tested in a scientific way nor made to serve people 

 generally 



'From The Forgotten Village, by John Steinbeck, © 1941, by permission of The Viking 

 Press, Inc., New York. 



329 



