A History of Science, vol 1 | Page 8

Coupled with this knowledge of things dangerous to the human system,

there must have grown up, at a very early day, a belief in the remedial
character of various vegetables as agents to combat disease. Here, of
course, was a rudimentary therapeutics, a crude principle of an
empirical art of medicine. As just suggested, the lower order of animals
have an instinctive knowledge that enables them to seek out remedial
herbs (though we probably exaggerate the extent of this instinctive
knowledge); and if this be true, man must have inherited from his
prehuman ancestors this instinct along with the others. That he
extended this knowledge through observation and practice, and came
early to make extensive use of drugs in the treatment of disease, is
placed beyond cavil through the observation of the various existing
barbaric tribes, nearly all of whom practice elaborate systems of
therapeutics. We shall have occasion to see that even within historic
times the particular therapeutic measures employed were often crude,
and, as we are accustomed to say, unscientific; but even the crudest of
them are really based upon scientific principles, inasmuch as their
application implies the deduction of principles of action from previous
observations. Certain drugs are applied to appease certain symptoms of
disease because in the belief of the medicine-man such drugs have
proved beneficial in previous similar cases.
All this, however, implies an appreciation of the fact that man is subject
to "natural" diseases, and that if these diseases are not combated, death
may result. But it should be understood that the earliest man probably
had no such conception as this. Throughout all the ages of early
development, what we call "natural" disease and "natural" death meant
the onslaught of a tangible enemy. A study of this question leads us to
some very curious inferences. The more we look into the matter the
more the thought forces itself home to us that the idea of natural death,
as we now conceive it, came to primitive man as a relatively late
scientific induction. This thought seems almost startling, so axiomatic
has the conception "man is mortal" come to appear. Yet a study of the
ideas of existing savages, combined with our knowledge of the point of
view from which historical peoples regard disease, make it more
probable that the primitive conception of human life did not include the
idea of necessary death. We are told that the Australian savage who
falls from a tree and breaks his neck is not regarded as having met a

natural death, but as having been the victim of the magical practices of
the "medicine-man" of some neighboring tribe. Similarly, we shall find
that the Egyptian and the Babylonian of the early historical period
conceived illness as being almost invariably the result of the
machinations of an enemy. One need but recall the superstitious
observances of the Middle Ages, and the yet more recent belief in
witchcraft, to realize how generally disease has been personified as a
malicious agent invoked by an unfriendly mind. Indeed, the
phraseology of our present-day speech is still reminiscent of this; as
when, for example, we speak of an "attack of fever," and the like.
When, following out this idea, we picture to ourselves the conditions
under which primitive man lived, it will be evident at once how
relatively infrequent must have been his observation of what we usually
term natural death. His world was a world of strife; he lived by the
chase; he saw animals kill one another; he witnessed the death of his
own fellows at the hands of enemies. Naturally enough, then, when a
member of his family was "struck down" by invisible agents, he
ascribed this death also to violence, even though the offensive agent
was concealed. Moreover, having very little idea of the lapse of
time--being quite unaccustomed, that is, to reckon events from any
fixed era--primitive man cannot have gained at once a clear conception
of age as applied to his fellows. Until a relatively late stage of
development made tribal life possible, it cannot have been usual for
man to have knowledge of his grandparents; as a rule he did not know
his own parents after he had passed the adolescent stage and had been
turned out upon the world to care for himself. If, then, certain of his
fellow-beings showed those evidences of infirmity which we ascribe to
age, it did not necessarily follow that he saw any association between
such infirmities and the length of time which those persons had lived.
The very fact that some barbaric nations retain the custom of killing the
aged and infirm, in itself suggests the possibility that this custom arose
before a clear conception had been attained that such drags upon the
community would be removed presently in the natural order