THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN MEDICINE FROM 

 ANCIENT FOLKWAYS ^ 



By Waltek C. Alvarez, M. D. 



[With 1 plate] 



In all matters relating to disease, credulity remains a 

 permanent fact, uninfluenced by civilization or education. 



Sir Wm. Osler. 



Some time ago when I began to arrange the notes for this lecture 

 on the emergence of modern scientific medicine from the folkways of 

 the past, the realization gradually came to me that it hasn't yet 

 quite emerged, and that this fact would have to be taken into account 

 in any discussion of the subject. What I came to see as I looked 

 about me more thoughtfully was that although in its achievements 

 and in its promise for the future, scientific medicine has immeasurably 

 outdistanced the folk medicine, faith healing, cult medicine, and out- 

 and-out quackery which has always competed with it, these competi- 

 tors, which one would think might now be abandoned as superfluous, 

 still flourish in the land, and still maintain their original hold on the 

 affections of mankind. 



As I shall emphasize later on in this lecture, a savage community 

 usually has two types of medical practitioner: One, the witch doctor 

 who cures by incantation and ceremonial and jugglery, and the other, 

 the herb doctor and bone setter, who, according to his lights, prac- 

 tices much as does a scientific physician. Among the savages the 

 witch doctor is usually held in higher esteem than is the herb doctor, 

 and so also in the supposedly civilized parts of the world the quack 

 often pulls in the crowds and waxes rich while the less spectacular 

 but well-trained physician plods on without much acclaim. 



For instance, a few years ago in the environs of Paris, crowds 

 flocked to the booth of a man who was selling herbs to the accompani- 

 ment of an attractive and plausible line of patter. When the police 

 arrested him for practicing medicine without a license, they discovered 

 to their surprise that he was not a quack but really a licensed physician, 

 and they were still more surprised when he begged them not to reveal 



> Read at the open meeting of the Minnesota Chapter, Jan. 24, 1936. Reprinted by permission, with 

 some alterations by the author, from the Sigma Xi Quarterly, vol. 24, No. 3, September 1936. 



409 

 31508—38 30 



