NEW OUTLOOKS IN MEDICINE. 361 



tion of mankind, consciously or unconsciously, personify disease 

 or think of it as something foreign to the body, some definite or 

 mysterious thing intrusive. From the painted red man of the 

 plains, who associated his bodily ailments with demons, spirits of 

 the dead, witchcraft, magic, evil possession, and angry gods, and 

 hopes to banish these with shrieks and songs, it is indeed a far 

 cry to the clean, clad, business or professional white man of the 

 town, who more or less sheepishly confesses that he carries a 

 horse-chestnut or a potato in his pocket to ward off rheumatism. 

 But. between the charm of the horse-chestnut and the chant of 

 the savage lies a great body of ignorance and superstition, upon 

 which quacks nourish mightily, and which can not be altogether 

 ignored in any wide outlook to-day over the field of medical sci- 

 ence and medical art. 



In fact, the superstitious red man is much more reasonable 

 and logical in his procedures for the cure of disease, considering 

 the scope and character of his conceptions of its nature and the 

 phase of civilization which he represents, than are large numbers 

 of considerably evolved white folks who, in the midst of highly 

 civilized and cultured communities, bow still at the altars of 

 sanitary savagery, cherish a devotion to drugs almost pathetic, 

 and utterly fail to grasp the significance of the new conceptions 

 of disease which at last have made of medicine an exact science. 



That which has especially contributed to the establishment of 

 medicine on a firm and rational basis is the gradual centering 

 of our thought and experiment upon definite and tangible struc- 

 tural features of the body, and the conviction that the phys- 

 ical nature of man is closely interlinked with that of lower 

 forms of life. 



In its primitive phases, medicine brought gods and men into 

 close relationship and led constantly to religious conceptions. It 

 was, in fact, not a science, but a religion. The early priests were 

 physicians, the primal gods were gods of healing, and their temples 

 were hospitals. As time passed, absorbing speculations, fantastic 

 of ten, frequently grotesque, about the structure of the body and 

 the nature of disease, won general belief and disappeared. The- 

 ories, systems, and schools came and went. Now mysticism and 

 magic, now humors and philosophy, held sway. Quackeries and 

 frauds flourished for their little hour, and vanished, as they 

 always must. Finally, the body itself became the object of direct 

 study, and the mysteries began to clear. 



But it was a long time after it became reputable and legal to 

 study the anatomy of the human body before the old physicians 

 acquired a definite conception of it as an admirably grouped as- 

 semblage of tissues and organs. It took much longer for the 

 development of accurate notions as to the functions and uses of 



VOL. XLVIII. 26 



