420 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1937 



injured in an accident or mauled by an enemy or a wild beast, then 

 he must have been harmed by witchcraft or he must have offended 

 some deity or broken some tabu. 



One of these ideas has come down to us embalmed in a word. Thus, 

 when an old man drops to the floor unable to speak or to use his right 

 arm or leg, we physicians say that a blood-vessel in the brain has 

 either ruptured or been plugged in some way. But the layman says 

 that it is a stroke, wliich implies that God was angry and reached out 

 and struck the man do\vn. I never realized how fully a college gradu- 

 ate could believe this until one day when, as I sat by the minister's 

 wife, encouraging her to learn to talk again after a bad cerebral 

 thrombosis, I found that the endlessly recurring question in her mind 

 was: "Wherein have I sinned so terribly that God has struck me down 

 in this cruel way ; why has He done this to me who have served Him 

 lovingly all my days?" 



But to get back to the savages and their ideas of medicine: Seeing 

 that to them disease is due purely to the malevolence of gods and 

 witches, it is easy to understand why their most prized physicians 

 are not expected to have any knowledge of the body or of surgery or 

 of healing herbs; all they are asked to do is to find out w^hich god is 

 angry and why, or which witch is at work and who is employing him. 

 After that they must know how to appease the god, or to nullify the 

 evil charms of the witch \\Tith yet stronger charms and spells. 



THE TWO TYPES OF HEALER AND THEIR DESCENDANTS 



And so it is that wherever on this earth one encounters primitive 

 people one is likely to find that the most respected and most feared 

 man in the tribe is the witch doctor. Often he is a sort of Pooh Bah 

 who exercises the functions of physician, seer, prophet, priest, sorcerer, 

 master of ceremonies, and perhaps even king. Sometimes he repre- 

 sents the finest flower of the development of his people, and then again 

 he may be little more than a juggler and an assassin who will kill 

 for a price. 



But what happens when a savage falls out of a tree and breaks his 

 legs, or comes back from a raid with part of his scalp hanging over 

 his ear, or what is done to help the man who gets constipated or has a 

 boil that needs lancing? Will the witch doctor bother with such 

 small practice? No, that is usually beneath his notice, and hence in 

 every tribe there is another kind of healer, a man or woman who can 

 clean w^ounds and bring the edges together, who can splint a broken 

 leg or pull a dislocated bone back into place, who can incise an abscess 

 or knock out an aching tooth, who can massage stiff muscles or give a 

 sweat bath, and who knows the lore of medicinal plants. 



And here I get to the central theme of my discourse, and this is that 

 from the time when man first stepped down out of the trees and made 



