Edward Berdoe

“ It is as certain that a savage will worship his fetish, pray to his idol, and believe in disease-demons, and their expulsion by charms and talismans, as that he will tattoo or paint his body, stick feathers in his hair, and rings in his nose and ears; it is part of the evolution of man on his way to civilization. To suddenly deprive a savage or barbarian of all his magic remedies, his amulets and charms, would be as foolish as it would be futile: foolish, because many amulets and charms are perfectly harmless, and help to quiet and soothe the patient’s mind ”

“ From them you may learn the nature of all things, the causes of sickness and of health, how to banish the one and how to preserve the other; for they can do both at pleasure. They will describe to you minutely the origin, the beginning, the progress, and the cure of all diseases. In a word, when I hear them harangue, I am charmed; I think them not inferior to Mercury or Æsculapius, and almost persuade myself that they can raise the dead. There is only one thing that makes me hesitate. Their theories are as directly opposite to one another as light and darkness. ”

“ Let the astronomers vaunt their Copernicus, the natural philosophers their Galileo and Torricelli, the mathematicians their Pascal, the geographers their Columbus, I shall always place Vesalius above all their heroes. The first study for man is man. Vesalius has this noble object in view, and has admirably attained it; he has made on himself and his fellows such discoveries as Columbus could only make by travelling to the extremity of the world. The discoveries of Vesalius are of direct importance to man; by acquiring fresh knowledge of his own structure, man seems to enlarge his existence ”

“ Machinery began to take the place of hand labour in numberless branches of trade and industry. Nobler than these material blessings, however, was the awakening of the English people to a new and higher humanity. It seemed that as Science began to shower her gifts on our nation, it yearned to become the almoner of mankind, and in its turn to bless the world with the precious gifts of freedom, education, improved sanitation, and the means of developing the dormant higher powers of the species. ”

“ His aim was to convert inferior metals into gold; that which should turn base metals into gold would be also a universal medicine, would cure or prevent diseases, prolong life, and make the body beautiful and strong. The philosopher’s stone would embrace in itself all perfections. Alchemy led to chemistry; it is even declared by some to have been the mother of chemistry. Some have thought that without the hope of making gold and other precious things, men would never have been inspired to investigate the secrets of nature and sustained in the arduous and often dangerous work of the chemist. ”

“ Fire longs to manifest itself in various forms; from its pure state in heaven it descends, assumes the form of earth, passing in its progress through that of water. Man’s soul is a spark of the divine fire. ”

“ It is scarcely conceivable that so patient and shrewd a people as the Hindus, a people at once so observant and so profoundly speculative, should not have kept pace with the other enlightened nations of the world in the study of medicine and surgery. The vegetation of India is so rich in medicinal herbs that its Materia Medica could hardly be equalled in any other country; so that both by intellect and by location the Hindus should be amongst the foremost professors of the art of medicine. ”

“ When the physician is confronted by a new form of disease for which no remedy has been discovered, he must know its cause and origin, or his practice will be mere guess-work. Anybody can discover the evident causes—heat, cold, over-eating. These things the least instructed physician will probably know. It is the knowledge of hidden causes which makes the superior man. He who aspires to be instructed must know what we now call physiology—why we breathe, why we eat, what happens to the food which we swallow, why the arteries pulsate, why we sleep, etc. ”

“ If the Bible, the Talmud, and the Koran are all three merely specimens of ancient literature, how comes it that the Bible is so infinitely superior, not only in its noble monotheism, but in its remarkable freedom from so many of the superstitions which, as we have seen, were everywhere intermixed with the noblest religious systems and the most advanced civilizations? Magic in the Bible is everywhere passed by with contempt. ”

“ The magnificent civilization of the Greek world fell to pieces like a noble but ruined temple, and its precious relics went to form a score of other civilizations which ultimately arose from its ruins. It was not the Semitic peoples of Arabia which restored the philosophy and science of the decayed Græco-Roman world, it was the Persians, the Greeks of Asia Minor, the people of Alexandria, and the cultured Eastern nations, generally, which having been subdued by the Arabs, at once began to impart to their conquerors the culture which they lacked. ”

“ I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patient, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practise my art. ”

“ As wine restores the flagging energies of the body and mind, and seems to have the power of calling back to life the departing spirit, and inspiring the languishing vitality of man, Bacchus would naturally enough be a god of medicine. ”

“ In these times, when no department of science is hidden from the uninitiated, especially when medical subjects and the works of medical men are freely discussed in our great reviews and daily journals, no apology seems necessary for withdrawing the professional veil and admitting the laity behind the scenes of professional work.
Medicine now has no mysteries to conceal from the true student of nature and the scientific inquirer. Her methods and her principles are open to all who care to know them; the only passport she requires is reverence, her only desire to satisfy the yearning to know. ”

“ Not only the heroes, but the martyrs of medicine, crowd the scientific calendar. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fertile in the efforts to apply the results of discoveries in the physical sciences to the relief of human suffering. If these efforts were but partially successful, so far as medicine—considered apart from surgery—was concerned, it was not in consequence of less industry in that department, but because speculation and theorising about the causes of disease monopolised the attention which, if devoted to observation of facts, would have been fertile in result. ”

“ Ere the ground could be cleared for the new palace of physical science which the glorious sixteenth century was to rear, scepticism must lend its withering and desolating aid; foul undergrowths must be destroyed; evil germs, bred of the stagnant marshes of the dark ages, must perish under the wholesome, if ruthless, disinfectants of reason and unbelief. There was a stern need of this. The demon theory of disease had lasted from primeval ages up to this dawn of the sixteenth century. ”

“ There are certain hereditary conditions which we may not be able to avoid, and men may hinder our acquisition of the boon; but as a race man holds his own destiny in his hands, and can choose the good and reject the evil. Exit the disease-demon! Fevers and other epidemic diseases are no longer attributed to the anger of the Supreme Being; they may be prevented. If we use the words scourge, plague, visitation, and the like, it is merely because we recognise that Nature can take offence at our violation of her laws, and visit us with the penalty. ”

“ Innumerable hosts of them caused all the phenomena of nature, from the movements of the stars to the life and death, the health and disease of every human being. This dualism was as marked as that of the religion of Zoroaster; everywhere and in everything the good spirits fought against the evil ones, discord prevailed throughout the universe; and on this conception rested the whole theory of sacred magic. ”

“ Prognosis, then, is one of the chief characteristics of Hippocratic medicine. He hated all charlatanism, and was free from all popular superstition. When we reflect on the medicine of the most highly civilized nations which we have considered at length in the preceding pages, and remember how full of absurdities, of magic, amulet lore, and other things calculated to impose on the credulity of the people, were their attempts at healing, we shall be inclined to say, that the most wonderful thing in the history of Hippocrates was his complete divorce from the evil traditions of the past. ”

“ The Emperor Claudius caused slaves who were thus cruelly treated to be proclaimed freemen. It was the merciful and charitable conduct of the early Christians towards slaves, of whom such vast numbers helped to people the Roman Empire, that caused the doctrines of the Gospel to spread so rapidly throughout the Roman world. The slave found in the Gospel of Christ the first system of religion and philosophy which took any account of the poor, the helpless, and the slave; the rich and cultured saw in the teachings of the Church of Christ the only system which embraced mankind as a whole. ”

“ He said,348 “Reading never made a doctor, but practice is what forms a physician. For all reading is a footstool to practice, and a mere feather broom. He who meditates discovers something.” And so he held converse with the common folk, and talked and drank with boors, shepherds, Jews, gypsies, and tramps, gaining odd scraps of knowledge wherever he could. He had no books. His only volume was Nature, whom he interrogated at first-hand. He would rather learn medicine and surgery from an old country nurse than from an university lecturer. ”

“ The study of Aristotle awakened in him a species of pantheism. He was more a philosopher than a physician, but as he had made important observations in medicine, he deserves a place amongst the heroes of the healing art. He was bitterly persecuted amongst his co-religionists for treating the Koran as a merely human work. He taught that the small-pox never attacks the same person more than once. In practice he held very rational views of the action of remedies, and taught that the work of the doctor was chiefly to apply general principles to individual cases. ”

“ Hippocrates was the first physician who delivered medicine from the thraldom of superstition and the sophistries of philosophers, and gave it an independent existence. It was impossible that our science should make progress so long as men believed that disease was caused by an angry demon or an offended divinity, and was only to be cured by expelling the one or propitiating the other. ”

“ Then arose the schools of medicine which ultimately became famous, as those of the Dogmatists, Empirics, Methodists, Pneumatists, etc. The Dogmatists boasted of being the Rational and Logical school. They held that there is a certain connection between all the arts and sciences, and that it is the duty of the physician to avail himself of all sorts of knowledge on every subject which bears any relationship to his own. They made, therefore, the most careful inquiry into the remote and proximate causes of disease. ”

“ This will at once be perceived when we examine the Vedas, the works of any Greek author, or those of Teutonic speculative writers, and then turn to any Semitic books. We instantly perceive that in the latter we have nothing but belief or intuition, with more or less of the doctrine of Revelation or Inspiration. In the works of Aryan origin, on the contrary, we are at the opposite pole; we have speculation, inquiry, an insatiable desire to solve the mystery of things—the analytical spirit which asks a reason for every phenomenon in the universe. ”

“ Zamolxis, who was a god to the Getans, is supposed by some to have been a slave and disciple of Pythagoras; by others he is considered an altogether mythical personage. He is credited by those who believe him to have been a physician with having said that “A man could not cure the eyes without curing the head, nor the head without all the rest of the body, nor the body without the soul.” Plato said much the same thing when he remarked, “To cure a headache you must treat the whole man.” Zamolxis cured the soul, not by the enchantments of magic, but by wise discourse and reasonable conversation. ”

“ Bacchus, or, as he was called by the Greeks, Dionysus, as the god of wine, and an inspired and an inspiring deity, who revealed the future by oracles, cured diseases by discovering to sufferers in their dreams their appropriate remedies. The prophet, the priest, and the physician are so often blended in one in the early history of civilization, that the same ideas naturally clustered round Bacchus as around Apollo, and other great benefactors of mankind. The giver of vines and wine was the dispenser of the animating, exalting, intoxicating powers of nature. ”

“ It seems strange that, although Hippocrates and the scepticism of the Epicureans had apparently destroyed the faith in magicians amongst the learned, that men should have so soon reverted to the absurdities from which they had been delivered; but there is an element in our nature which can only be satisfied by that which magic represents, and even in the present age of science we have reverted to the same things under the names of Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Occultism. ”

“ In relation to the history of medicine, the science of the century has perhaps on the whole done greater service to the healing art by that which it has taught doctors to leave undone than by what it has taught them to do. ”

“ It was only natural that the philosophical Greeks should discuss medicine at as great a length as they discussed philosophy; accordingly, we find that no sooner had our art taken its place amongst the subjects worthy of being seriously considered by the Greek intellect, than it was as much talked about as practised, and wrangled over as though it were a system of religion. ”

“ Wäinämöinen was the great spirit of life, the master of favourable spells, conqueror of evil, and sovereign possessor of science. The sweat which dropped from his body was a balm for all diseases. It was he alone who could conquer all the demons. Every disease was itself a demon. The invasion of the disorder was an actual possession. Finnish magic was chiefly medical, being used to cure diseases and wounds.33 The Finns believed diseases to be the daughters of Louhiatar, the demon of diseases. Pleurisy, gout, colic, consumption, leprosy, and the plague were all distinct personages. ”

“ Asceticism, mysticism, and Neoplatonism sprang from this noble and lofty philosophy. Closely connected with his theory of numbers he held that from these points are produced, from these lines, from lines figures, and from figures solid bodies. The elements fire, water, earth, and air, account in his conception for the formation of the world. He understood the structure of the body, its procreation and development. He believed that the animal soul is an emanation from the world-soul; the universal soul is God, author of himself. ”

“ Having brought all these requisites to the study of medicine, and having acquired a true knowledge of it, we shall then, in travelling through the cities, be esteemed physicians not only in name but in reality. But inexperience is a bad treasure, and a bad friend to those who possess it, whether in opinion or reality, being devoid of self-reliance and contentedness, and the nurse both of timidity and audacity. For timidity betrays a want of power, and audacity a want of skill. ”