The Evolution of Modern Medicine | Page 5

little coral reef capped with green, an atoll, a mimic
earth, fringed with life, built up through countless ages by life on the
remains of life that has passed away. And now, with wings of fancy,
join Ianthe in the magic car of Shelley, pass the eternal gates of the
flaming ramparts of the world and see his vision:
Below lay stretched the boundless Universe! There, far as the remotest
line That limits swift imagination's flight, Unending orbs mingled in
mazy motion, Immutably fulfilling Eternal Nature's law. Above, below,
around, The circling systems formed A wilderness of harmony.
(Daemon of the World, Pt. I.)
And somewhere, "as fast and far the chariot flew," amid the mighty
globes would be seen a tiny speck, "earth's distant orb," one of "the
smallest lights that twinkle in the heavens." Alighting, Ianthe would
find something she had probably not seen elsewhere in her magic
flight--life, everywhere encircling the sphere. And as the little coral
reef out of a vast depth had been built up by generations of polyzoa, so
she would see that on the earth, through illimitable ages, successive
generations of animals and plants had left in stone their imperishable
records: and at the top of the series she would meet the thinking,
breathing creature known as man. Infinitely little as is the architect of
the atoll in proportion to the earth on which it rests, the polyzoon, I
doubt not, is much larger relatively than is man in proportion to the vast
systems of the Universe, in which he represents an ultra-microscopic
atom less ten thousand times than the tiniest of the "gay motes that
people the sunbeams." Yet, with colossal audacity, this thinking atom

regards himself as the anthropocentric pivot around which revolve the
eternal purposes of the Universe. Knowing not whence he came, why
he is here, or whither he is going, man feels himself of supreme
importance, and certainly is of interest--to himself. Let us hope that he
has indeed a potency and importance out of all proportion to his
somatic insignificance. We know of toxins of such strength that an
amount too infinitesimal to be gauged may kill; and we know that "the
unit adopted in certain scientific work is the amount of emanation
produced by one million-millionth of a grain of radium, a quantity
which itself has a volume of less than a million-millionth of a cubic
millimetre and weighs a million million times less than an
exceptionally delicate chemical balance will turn to" (Soddy, 1912).
May not man be the radium of the Universe? At any rate let us not
worry about his size. For us he is a very potent creature, full of interest,
whose mundane story we are only beginning to unravel.
Civilization is but a filmy fringe on the history of man. Go back as far
as his records carry us and the story written on stone is of yesterday in
comparison with the vast epochs of time which modern studies demand
for his life on the earth. For two millions (some hold even three
millions) of years man lived and moved and had his being in a world
very different from that upon which we look out. There appear, indeed,
to have been various types of man, some as different from us as we are
from the anthropoid apes. What upstarts of yesterday are the Pharaohs
in comparison with the men who survived the tragedy of the glacial
period! The ancient history of man--only now beginning to be studied--
dates from the Pliocene or Miocene period; the modern history, as we
know it, embraces that brief space of time that has elapsed since the
earliest Egyptian and Babylonian records were made. This has to be
borne in mind in connection with the present mental status of man,
particularly in his outlook upon nature. In his thoughts and in his
attributes, mankind at large is controlled by inherited beliefs and
impulses, which countless thousands of years have ingrained like
instinct. Over vast regions of the earth today, magic, amulets, charms,
incantations are the chief weapons of defense against a malignant
nature; and in disease, the practice of Asa[*] is comparatively novel
and unusual; in days of illness many millions more still seek their gods

rather than the physicians. In an upward path man has had to work out
for himself a relationship with his fellows and with nature. He sought
in the supernatural an explanation of the pressing phenomena of life,
peopling the world with spiritual beings, deifying objects of nature, and
assigning to them benign or malign influences, which might be invoked
or propitiated. Primitive priest, physician and philosopher were one,
and struggled, on the one hand, for the recognition of certain practices
forced on him by experience, and on the other, for the