1290 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
and the priest and the medicine man were generally one and 
the same person. But the stubborn fact that disease is fre¬ 
quently readily eradicated by resorting to definite physical 
treatment with herbs or substances of animal or mineral origin 
gradually gained ground, took the place of the exhortations 
to remove evil spirits, and formed the basis of the science of 
medicine. That the early attempts to cure disease should 
have been extremely crude is most natural, and that they 
should have been influenced by superstition and religious 
views for a long time was to have been expected. It must be 
remembered that even in the days of George Washington it was 
still reputable practice to administer to patients such things as 
iron from the nails of the coffins of criminals, serpents 7 excre¬ 
ment, parts of vipers, and pulverized skull bones of murde.-ers 
as specifics for certain diseases. Was it not the great chemist 
and apothecary Carl Wilhelm Scheele, a contemporary of Wash¬ 
ington, who first had the courage to banish such things from 
the shelves of his shop. And are we at the present day quite 
emancipated from the idea of the treatment of disease by 
mental effort alone ? The notion that our bodily ills are con¬ 
trolled by our psychical condition is thus very old indeed, and 
its persistence is not to be wondered at or even lightly regarded, 
for after all it contains a considerable element of truth, of 
which every truly successful modern physician is cognizant,, 
and of which, directly or indirectly, he avails himself in min¬ 
istering to his patients. 
It is in the study of medicine that many of our natural 
sciences like botany, zoology, and chemistry really had their 
origin. The heavenly bodies excited wonderment and study 
even in earliest times, and so astronomy had its beginnings in 
the remote past. Hor was it strange that our forefathers should 
have fancied definite connections between their daily affairs, 
their diseases, the progress made by their crops, and the move¬ 
ments of certain heavenly bodies. . Does not to the minds of 
some to the present day the particular phase of the moon have 
considerable to do with choosing the time for planting the seed 
so as to insure a good yield % Mathematical computations also 
