December 



LIII 



One may often hear a comparison made between modem 

 medicine and surgery, greatly to the disparage- primitiye 

 ment of the former science. Be it admitted Leechcraft 

 freely that physicians can show nothing to rival the 

 splendid advance which the adoption successively of 

 antiseptic and aseptic methods has enabled surgeons to 

 accomplish within living memory, still we have only to 

 take account of the blind pranks which practitioners of 

 old played upon their patients to thank God that we are 

 no longer in the hands of such blundering blockheads as 

 they. The Rev. Oswald Cockayne has edited for the 

 Records Series a collection of primitive medical essays 

 under the title of Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft 

 of Ea/rly England, and truly it would be difficult to com- 

 pile a more convincing example of human folly. Many 

 of the records prescribed seem worse than the diseases 

 they professed to cure : unspeakably nasty, some of them, 

 directing how the filthiest things on earth were to be 

 pounded together and mixed with the patient's meat and 

 drink, in a manner of which the slightest acquaintance 

 with bacteriology and the history of internal parasites 

 enables us to perceive the terrible danger; irresistibly 

 ludicrous others, as when wise Abbot -lElfric (for he was 

 wise in many things) directs as a remedy for headache 



