EMERGENCE OF MODERN MEDICINE— ALVAREZ 4^9 



pick up all the little parings so as to destroy them in the fire? Why- 

 will she say that for the first year of the baby's Hfe the nails must be 

 bitten off? Ask her and she will probably say that if this is not done 

 the baby will grow up to be a thief or it will sicken and die. But let 

 us ask the official nail-paring swaUower of a Madagascar chief (I have 

 read in scientific treatises that there is such a man) or let us ask any 

 savage anywhere on the face of the earth, and he will tell us that when 

 the nails are bitten off the pieces must be swallowed. If they were to 

 be left around, and a bad witch were to get hold of a piece, she could 

 easily say some spells over it, and disaster would soon come to the 

 baby. 



I never cease marveling at the antiquity and the wide dissemination 

 of scores of these beliefs. For instance, there are many poor homes 

 in England today in which, if a child is seriously ill, the grandmother 

 will want to administer a skinned mouse as a medicine. But why a 

 mouse? To find out we have to go to Egypt where each year as the 

 Nile subsides and the peasants go back to their fields, they find in the 

 cracks in the mud an abundance of mice. They think that these 

 mice sprang from the mud, and therefore must represent an essence 

 of the life-giving virtues of the river. What is more appropriate, then, 

 than to save a dying cliild with a medicine which represents life 

 abundant? And now comes what, to my mind, is the most interesting 

 part of the story, and this is that when Elliott Smith was studying the 

 mummies of some little children who lived in Egypt over 6,000 years 

 ago, long before the pyramids were built, he found in each stomach — 

 a mouse ! 



ANCIENT THEORIES OF THE CAUSATION OF DISEASE 



Now it will be noticed in the examples which I have given of present- 

 day medical superstition that disease is usually supposed to be due 

 to the malevolence of the devil or of witches or wicked elves, or of men 

 who know enough of the magic arts to summon help from the powers 

 of darkness. What is more natural, then, than to assume that health 

 is to be maintained by warding off evil in some magic or symbolic way. 



But where did we get these ideas? I feel sure that we got them 

 from our remote beetling-browed ancestors who hunted the reindeer 

 and the woolly mammoth in the days when the great ice sheets were 

 retreating northward toward the pole. But someone says: How can 

 anyone know what those ancient savages thought? Well, we cannot 

 know for certain, but here and there in the few remaining wildernesses, 

 explorers come upon men who live in a stone age very similar to that 

 of our ancient ancestors, and always these men are found to have 

 about the same ideas in regard to disease. Never having heard of 

 germs or high blood-pressure or hardening of the arteries, it never 

 occurs to them that a man might die of natural causes. If he wasn't 



