TRADITIONAL MEDICINE. 365 



Iii the meantime, the community of things is proved by evil, if not 

 by good ; and in bringing this to light, the pioneers of health have 

 already great merits. They have shown that nothing is lost, but 

 that disease springs from neglected social duties. The map of dirti- 

 ness is also the map of disease ; the map of intemperance, ditto ; 

 the map of pauperism, ditto. They have afforded new force to the 

 truth, that all things are in the effort to be promoted into man. 

 Swamps and ditches, in their new rank and honors, are fevers, 

 choleras, and the like. If we have not dwelt upon these subjects 

 more in detail, it is because our vocation here leads us to illustrate 

 organization, as a means of opening the mind itself by a just educa- 

 tion. But for all present purposes, we concede the palm of useful- 

 ness to these brave sanitary inquirers. 



So much for the curing of societies, which the public health-doc- 

 tors have undertaken to superintend : we now come to medicine in 

 the more ordinary sense, as it proffers aid to individuals in their 

 maladies, according to certain rules and methods, new and old. 



The earth appears to be netted over with a traditional healing 

 power ; for some knowledge of herbs and simples belongs perhaps 

 to every race, to enable it to apply the products of the soil to the 

 cure of its own immediate distresses. As each land has its national 

 music, and in some countries almost every dale has its melodies, so 

 each seems also to have its national medicine, derived from imme- 

 morial times. How the places came by the knowledge is not often 

 asked. We cannot but think that in this fact also, we have traces 

 of an ancient state of man of which history has not brought us the 

 records. If in the earliest national myths there be evidence of a 

 condition in which the faculties and imaginations were more full 

 of tact and grasp than now; if the first bards loved, and were 

 loved by, nature, with a fondling intimacy to which we are strangers, 

 there is reason to suppose that this intimacy extended to every 

 walk of life, and that there was a primitive shine of knowledge 

 anticipating the arts and sciences, and in which medicine, and the 

 skill of herbs, would partake. If newness of powers is still so 

 great a gift, that infancy is a delight through the livelong day 

 because the world is fresh and sense unworn, what must have been 



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