450 APPENDIX 



astounding hardihood. Bartels mentions an account by an eye- 

 witness of a successfully performed Caesarian section done by a 

 medicine-man in Uganda (Central Africa) on a primipara, aged 

 twenty years. 



The evolution of a certain class of special healers among the 

 members of a tribe is what constitutes the great difference be- 

 tween human and animal therapeutics. 



Savage races can understand external wounds and the 

 dangers of parturition, but they are entirely ignorant of all in- 

 ternal disorders, and their ideas as to their causation are pure 

 guess-work. Demons of all kinds, magicians and witches, the 

 evil eye, worms and other creeping things were regarded as the 

 origin of internal disorders. Nor did the medicine-men know 

 what were the exciting causes of disease. They concealed their 

 ignorance by noisy rattling of drums, by exorcisms and spells ; 

 but even they understood how to employ water in various ways, 

 and how to prepare powerful drugs from plants known to them- 

 selves alone. 



Among the civilised peoples of to-day we can still see rem- 

 nants of the infancy of the nations in that form of medical art 

 which still flourishes quietly among the peasantry. The savage 

 races are now at the same point of development as regards thera- 

 peutics as were the forefathers of our own civilised peoples. 

 The most ancient systems employed blood, spittle, urine and 

 even excrement, as drugs ; but sympathy also, and the power of 

 the spoken word can be seen deeply ingrained in the old art of 

 the medicine-man. While the popular medicine was thus pro- 

 longing its clandestine existence, civilised therapeutics had 

 developed into a special branch of human knowledge. The 

 foundations were laid in the priestly schools of medicine of 

 Egypt and Mesopotamia ; in the ancient schools of Greece, and 

 in Alexandria, Byzantium and Rome it developed into a still 

 fuller life ; with this development and fruition the mediaeval 

 scholiasts were contented, but the Renaissance brought into the 

 realm of therapeutics new life and new developments. Men of 

 undying name entirely reconstructed anatomy and physiology, 

 and laid new foundations for the healing art in the more accurate 

 knowledge of the structure and behaviour of the human body. 

 Chemistry and the microscope became associated as axillary 

 to medicine, and the joyful plaudits of the people accompanied 

 the discoveries of the learned. From the second half of the six- 



