The Evolution of Medical Science. 135 



flesh to gain bravery, and his bones for strength. Weak 

 stomachs were supposed to be cured by eating strong ones. 

 People with short breath expected improvement from eat- 

 ing foxes, that were believed to have long breath. Only 

 women were allowed to eat deer-flesh, as it made them faint- 

 hearted. New-Zealanders make baptised children swallow 

 pebbles, to make them hard-hearted and incapable of pity.* 



Thus at the very dawn of knowledge, and among all 

 savages, the medical doctrine is that similars cure similars. 

 When very bad spirits were supposed to be in possession 

 of a patient, they fought them out with bad odors or very 

 abominable doses. It was still the same " similia similihus 

 curantur.'' What the Ptolemaic system and astrology were 

 to astronomy, this doctrine has been to medicine. Every 

 child has as natural a trend to this belief as it has to believ- 

 ing that the earth is flat and stationary. All barbarous 

 and savage people in every age have harbored it as they 

 have other superstitions. In fact, it is a strictly logical 

 superstitious deduction. As such, of course, it must con- 

 tain, somehow or somewhere, a soul of truth. It certainly 

 has been of incalculable advantage to the race, in leading 

 to experiments that laid the foundations of Science. Very 

 often it must have proven successful by causing vomiting 

 or catharsis to ensue, or a critical sweat to be established. 



Upon the facts thus garnered, the philosophers began to 

 work, and we find the disciples of Pythagoras going out 

 and visiting the sick at their homes. Before this, when 

 the priests held rule, the sick had to be carried to the 

 temples where they were. All the progress made in Med- 

 ical Science from this time onward was by battling priests 

 of every kind. Each new accretion has been a survival in 

 a most intense struggle for existence.! Hippocrates, in tlie 

 fifth century before Christ, gives us a systematic statement 

 of what was known up to this time, and we have only to 

 take succeeding gains, one by one, to see how truth has 

 always been challenged for its credentials. The worst part 

 of the battle has been in behalf of anatomy and physiol- 

 ogy the corner-stones of the Science and it continues 

 in some countries to this day. For ages, the dissection of 

 a human body was an act considered so sacrilegious that 

 murder was looked upon as less heinous. There are people 



* Lubbock's Origin of Civilization, p. 13. 

 t Warfare of Science, pp. 77 to 92. 



