EMERGENCE OF MODERN MEDICINE— ALVAREZ 



421 



himself a stone ax down to the present moment, there have always 

 been, in every community, two types of medical practitioner: One a 

 believer in some supernatural or similarly unprovable and ready-made 

 explanation of disease as a whole; the other, a student of the many 

 diseases as he finds them; the one disdainful of the study of the 

 structures and workings of the human body; the other a deep student 

 of these sciences; the one treating by means of charms and spells, 

 ceremony, hocus pocus, exorcism, and sacrifice; the other treating 

 with physical and chemical measures; one whose forte is the cure of 







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FiQTJEB 2.— An American Indian medicine man (from Catlin). 



nervous troubles, hysteria, and self-limited diseases; the other whose 

 greatest success is found in the healing of those lesions such as deep 

 wounds or bad fractures in which Mother Nature, unaided, either 

 fails to cure or else ends up with a bad result. 



THE CONSERVATISM OF THE WITCH DOCTORS 



As one would expect, the descendants of the witch doctor have not 

 changed their technique very much through the ages, and if tomorrow 

 they were to be called upon to cope with some terrible epidemic their 

 methods would be practically the same as those of their savage 

 ancestors. They would doubtless begin as they did in^Biblical times, 

 in the Middle Ages, and in the terrible winter of 1918, by fixing the 



