EMERGENCE OF MODERN MEDICINE— ALVAREZ 41 7 



why should anyone have difficulty in believing that other uneducated 

 persons can cure disease, especially when they have inherited some 

 special skill or some secret formulas for powerful remedies? So why 

 should there be all this demand that physicians be educated men? 



Actually, it is only the highly educated physician who finds it 

 difficult to take seriously the pretensions of healers who have spent 

 only a year or two in a low-grade college ; he alone knows how hard it 

 is to practice good medicine even after half a lifetime spent in study. 



BELIEF IN THE MIRACULOUS INCULCATED IN EARLY LIFE 



But there are yet other reasons, and very strong ones too, why all 

 of us look for miracles when it comes to the treatment of disease. We 

 may have spent 4 years at college learning that the universe is run 

 according to immutable laws, but throughout our youth, and almost 

 from the moment that we could understand speech, we were taught to 

 believe stories of miraculous suspensions of these laws, and we were 

 urged to ask daily that such miracles of protection be performed for 

 us and for our loved ones. 



Furthermore, in our daily contacts with the people about us and 

 with the world of books, we absorb, willy nUly and unconsciously, 

 much medical folklore which inevitably has an influence on our think- 

 ing and our behavior. And if it influences the behavior of an educated 

 man, how much more must it dominate the thought and the behavior 

 of the ignorant and the naturally credulous? None of us can escape 

 it. You sneeze, and some old person near you says, "God bless 

 you." Why did she do that? She probably does not know, but her 

 ancestors in Europe could have told us that you sneezed because a 

 httle devU was just then entering your body with evil intent, and 

 when your friend called upon the name of God, that devil had to get 

 out in a hurry. Unconsciously, you subscribe to the same idea when 

 you say, "I wonder what possessed me to do that?" or "I wonder what 

 can have gotten into that child." 



Or let us suppose that, without thinking in time to stop myself, I 

 remark to my wife that it is almost a year since I had a cold. I 

 immediately rap wood, but why? Actually, on looking this up in my 

 library on folklore, I found that I do not do it right. I really should be 

 pounding so hard on a log and maldng so much noise while I am 

 bragging that the devU will not be able to hear me and to say, "Watch 

 me and see how I take that cocky fellow down a peg." Now isn't 

 that silly, and yet I keep on rapping wood on every appropriate 

 occasion, just because it makes me feel safer. 



But you can't laugh at me because you have your own pet supersti- 

 tions. Perhaps you have a horseshoe over the bam door to keep out 

 the elves that would ride the horses all night and sicken the cows and 



