The Evolution of Modern Medicine | Page 8

the disease in those who refrained was more
relieved. Some ate during a fever, some a little before it, others after it
had subsided, and those who had waited to the end did best. For the
same reason some at the beginning of an illness used a full diet, others
a spare, and the former were made worse. Occurring daily, such things
impressed careful men, who noted what had best helped the sick, then
began to prescribe them. In this way medicine had its rise from the
experience of the recovery of some, of the death of others,
distinguishing the hurtful from the salutary things" (Book I). The
association of ideas was suggestive--the plant eyebright was used for
centuries in diseases of the eye because a black speck in the flower
suggested the pupil of the eye. The old herbals are full of similar
illustrations upon which, indeed, the so-called doctrine of signatures
depends. Observation came, and with it an ever widening experience.
No society so primitive without some evidence of the existence of a

healing art, which grew with its growth, and became part of the fabric
of its organization.
With primitive medicine, as such, I cannot deal, but I must refer to the
oldest existing evidence of a very extraordinary practice, that of
trephining. Neolithic skulls with disks of bone removed have been
found in nearly all parts of the world. Many careful studies have been
made of this procedure, particularly by the great anatomist and surgeon,
Paul Broca, and M. Lucas-Championniere has covered the subject in a
monograph.[2] Broca suggests that the trephining was done by
scratching or scraping, but, as Lucas-Championniere holds, it was also
done by a series of perforations made in a circle with flint instruments,
and a round piece of skull in this way removed; traces of these
drill-holes have been found. The operation was done for epilepsy,
infantile convulsions, headache, and various cerebral diseases believed
to be caused by confined demons, to whom the hole gave a ready
method of escape.
[2] Lucas-Championniere: Trepanation neolithique, Paris, 1912.
The practice is still extant. Lucas-Championniere saw a Kabyle thoubib
who told him that it was quite common among his tribe; he was the son
of a family of trephiners, and had undergone the operation four times,
his father twelve times; he had three brothers also experts; he did not
consider it a dangerous operation. He did it most frequently for pain in
the head, and occasionally for fracture.
The operation was sometimes performed upon animals. Shepherds
trephined sheep for the staggers. We may say that the modern
decompression operation, so much in vogue, is the oldest known
surgical procedure.
EGYPTIAN MEDICINE
OUT of the ocean of oblivion, man emerges in history in a highly
civilized state on the banks of the Nile, some sixty centuries ago. After
millenniums of a gradual upward progress, which can be traced in the
records of the stone age, civilization springs forth Minerva-like,

complete, and highly developed, in the Nile Valley. In this sheltered,
fertile spot, neolithic man first raised himself above his kindred races of
the Mediterranean basin, and it is suggested that by the accidental
discovery of copper Egypt "forged the instruments that raised
civilization out of the slough of the Stone Age" (Elliot Smith). Of
special interest to us is the fact that one of the best-known names of this
earliest period is that of a physician--guide, philosopher and friend of
the king--a man in a position of wide trust and importance. On leaving
Cairo, to go up the Nile, one sees on the right in the desert behind
Memphis a terraced pyramid 190 feet in height, "the first large structure
of stone known in history." It is the royal tomb of Zoser, the first of a
long series with which the Egyptian monarchy sought "to adorn the
coming bulk of death." The design of this is attributed to Imhotep, the
first figure of a physician to stand out clearly from the mists of
antiquity. "In priestly wisdom, in magic, in the formulation of wise
proverbs, in medicine and architecture, this remarkable figure of
Zoser's reign left so notable a reputation that his name was never
forgotten, and 2500 years after his death he had become a God of
Medicine, in whom the Greeks, who called him Imouthes, recognized
their own AEsculapius."[3] He became a popular god, not only healing
men when alive, but taking good care of them in the journeys after
death. The facts about this medicinae primus inventor, as he has been
called, may be gathered from Kurt Sethe's study.[4] He seems to have
corresponded very much to the Greek Asklepios. As a god he is met
with comparatively late, between 700 and 332 B.C. Numerous bronze
figures of him remain. The oldest memorial mentioning