THE INDEPENDENT 
1259 
7 
ognize the value of a knowledge of the body, and of the 
physical conditions under which man can best secure the 
highest usefulness and enjoyment; but I do not think that 
as yet this subject has received attention at all commen- 
surate with its vital bearing upon the well-being, spiritual 
as well as physical, of those whom the universities equip. 
So long as a knowledge of the human frame was looked at 
from the standpoint of the dispenser of mysterious drugs to 
a mysterious organism for the purpose of expelling myste- 
rious foes; sq long as the body was regarded chiefly as a 
more or less disreputable tabernacle for the temporary uses 
of the soul; so long as its harmonious and significant rela- 
tionship to other forms of being lay largely beyond our ken 
-so long, I say, as all these conditions prevailed, accurate 
knowledge of the body and the factors necessary to its 
well-being did not command attention in the higher educa- 
tional outlooks." 
(The address was printed in Popular Science for Jan- 
uary, 1896.) Both addresses chiefly dwelt upon the 
progress within this century, and on the evils we have 
thereby escaped ; and it has seemed as if an examina- 
tion of the conditions previously obtaining might be 
valuable, if not practically, at least to make us thank- 
ful that we were not born too soon; and to be in touch 
with the present outburst of Americanism, a good point 
at which to begin seemed to be the actual condi- 
tions, medically speaking, that surrounded the fore- 
fathers. 
Previous to their departure from England, medicine 
consisted mostly in a knowledge and use of simples- 
i. e., of herbs-and the housemother was the purveyor 
and dispenser. Gervase Markham, who wrote " The 
English Housewife" some years before our ancestors 
left that country, says, "A knowledge of physic is a 
principal virtue of a housewife." He gives directions 
to the housewife how to cure most diseases, but con- 
fesses that ''some fevers may pass the housewife's 
capacity." He speaks as if each of his remedies were 
infallible; they were called " sovereign." While none 
were injurious, many of them were inert, others ridic- 
ulous; and here and there it is seen that the essential 
virtues of some of the most valuable of modern reme- 
dies had at least been partially disclosed. For instance, 
when he directs powdered saffron to be mixed with 
poppy seed and lettuce seed, and then mixed with 
woman's milk, to be bound on the temples for sleep- 
lessness, we see that the king of soothing 
medicines, opium, was even then beginning to 
be known. For apoplexy or palsy ''the strong 
smell of a fox is exceeding sovereign." For quinsy the 
patient was to drink a decoction of mouse-ear in ale, 
and there was to be *'a stone rubbed where a hog had 
rubbed, and then the swelling was to be rubbed with it." 
Pains in the bones were to be treated with oil of swal- 
lows, the directions for making which are " to beat 
about twenty kinds of vegetables"-which he enumer- 
ates-in a mortar with ' ' twenty quick swallows," and 
butter and wax are to be added. An ancient aphorism, 
" Every part strengthens a part," led to the use of the 
most repulsive and unlovely secretions, even to excre- 
ments of animals; and there were some which evidently 
held a mystic element, such as a bone from the heart of 
a stag, the left foot of a tortoise, blood from under the 
wing of a white pigeon, and many more equally absurd, 
but used through the authority of the most learned 
physicians of the time. When we read that for a new 
cold or cough sugar and aqua vitse-euphemism for 
brandy-was to be taken on going to bed, we are re- 
minded of rock and rye of to-day; and when we find 
that for that parasitical disease very rife in the old 
times-itch-quicksilver beaten with other substances 
as an ointment was used, we see that they were on the 
track of the great destroyer of microbes now universally 
used as bichlorid of mercury. Nearly every family had 
its own combination of wax, rosin, turpentine and lard 
as a plaster for burns, cuts and other wounds; and 
many of these salves bore the name of some famous 
physician. In England many medicinal plants were 
cultivated in gardens, and treatises upon them were 
written and printed; and the New Englanders planted 
from seeds brought from the old country sage, 
hyssop, rue, tansy, wormwood, celandine, comfrey, 
saffron, mallows, chamomile, Mayweed, yarrow, 
shepherd's purse, dandelion, patience, bloody dock, 
elecampane, motherwort, burdock, plantain (which 
the Indians named white man's footstep), cat- 
nip, mint, fennel and dill. A housewife was supposed 
to know at just what period the virtues of each particu- 
lar plant were most potent, and when was the propi- 
tious moment for its garnering in one of those aromatic 
attics that formed the pharmacopaeial armamentarium of 
the wise mother. Some physicians followed this vege- 
table schedule of treatment called galenical in contra- 
distinction to the chemical-which meant the use of 
minerals-found to be most efficient in many diseases 
but from that time to this encountering a prejudice 
wholly undeserved. A Dr. Balivant, of Boston, is 
commended forasmuch as " he does not direct his 
patients to the East Indies for drugs when they may 
have far better out of their gardens"; and this simple 
practice largely prevailed here, while into England, in 
1660, there were imported 250 kinds of drugs, animal, 
vegetable and mineral, on which duty was paid; and 
so great was the number of substances used that a 
\ Sanitary♦ 
Miseries we Have Escaped by not Being 
Born too Soon. 
I. 
Dr. Edward G. Janeway, the eminent practitioner, 
and Dr. Y. Mitchell Prudden, the accomplished bacteri- 
ologist, have each given, within the last year, most 
interesting public addresses on that recent progress in 
medicine that has at last made of it a true science 
instead of a series of happy or unhappy guesses 
founded on very incomplete and imperfect knowledge. 
Each congratulates those at present living as having 
been born into a happier time, and each prophesies the 
great results to come to the general public through 
universally diffused accurate knowledge, and the appli- 
cation of that knowledge to what is certainly to be the 
medicine of the future-the prevention of disease through 
hygiene and sanitation. Dr. Prudden says: 
" Many of our institutions for higher education now rec- 8 
1260 
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writer of the time indulges his satirical propensities 
thus: 
" Doctors are not slow to pour drugs of which they know 
little into bodies of which they know less." 1291 
7 
Sanitary. 
Miseries we Have Escaped by not Being 
Born too Soon. 
II. 
Educated physicians were so few, that almost per- 
force the clergymen were found shining forth in what 
Mather, in the " Magnalia" called the " Angelical Con- 
junction -combining minister and physician in one. 
It is also pleasant to note that the woman highly skilled 
in medicine had also come upon the scene, as early as 
1631; for the wife of the Rev. John Eliot was one of 
those possessing skill in both medicine and surgery- 
but attending the sick and maimed without reward; 
and, later on, at the close of King Philip's War, Mrs. 
Allyn was allowed twenty pounds for attending sick 
and wounded soldiers by the Connecticut Council. 
Also the wife of William Miller, of Northampton, 
sometimes acted as a surgeon; and in 1688, in an au- 
thentic history of Virginia, "a gentlewoman, a noted 
female doctress " is mentioned, who cured those bitten 
by mad dogs! 
Many of the towns along the Connecticut River were 
without any resident physician for long periods-thirty 
and forty years; but it was almost inevitable that in 
their pioneer life there should be calls for the knowl- 
edge and services of a bonesetter-and there are men 
just as surely inspired to do this work as are the dic- 
tionary makers and the collectors of queer and useless 
articles. Their vivisection must have been confined to 
the killing and cutting up of domestic and wild animals 
for food; for Eliot, writing in 1647, says: 
"We never had but one anatomy [skeleton] in the 
country which Mr. Giles Firmin did make and rede upon 
well"; 
but Mr. Firmin was in advance of his times in medicine, 
and found it a scarcely paying business, for he writes 
to Governor Winthrop: 
" I am strongly sett upon to study divinitie. My studyes 
else must be lost, for physik is but a meene helpe." 
And he went back to England. 
For half a century after the settlement of the four 
towns, Northampton, Hadley, Hatfield and Deerfield, 
the average annual expense of doctor's bills was not 
more than $200, excluding those who were wounded by 
Indians. In 1727 the town of Hadley voted to give fifty 
pounds toward inducing " a good bonesetter " to locate 
among them if other towns would join them. We occa- 
sionally read of some of those tough old pioneers living 
to great age; but let no one imagine that those " former 
days " were better than ours. The average of human 
life was far shorter than now; and plain food and early 
hours were the rule-and the mischief of intoxicating 
drinks was almost unknown. Only those who can 
realize how anesthetics alone save life-for simple pain 
kills, if severe enough-can appreciate how suffering 
men and women laid down their lives untimely, because 
they had been born too soon; for, with all the flippant 
sneers at doctors and their inevitable limitations, there 
is no question that a well-educated physician, also en- 
dowed with common sense, is a valuable man in any 
community. 
The above sketch includes palpable diseases capable 
of being cured by tangible remedies, and does not 
touch on the large province of the diseases of " Faith " 
and Fascination, surrounded and enhanced by a pro- 
found belief in the abilities of what were called the 
"powers of darkness,'' among which was witchcraft, 
and the forces which were to be brought against it. THE INDEPENDENT 
1323 
7 
Sanitary* 
The Miseries We Have Escaped by not 
Being Born too Soon- 
III. 
An account of the state of medicine as a science in 
the century of the arrival of the Pilgrims in America, 
would be incomplete without a reference to the delusion 
of witchcraft, which reached a fearful hight just at its 
close. In a curious old volume published in 1695-just 
two centuries ago-called a " Compendium of the The- 
ory and Practice of Physic," by William Salmon, witch- 
craft is enumerated as a " Disease of Fascination." He 
says it may be known by 
" pinings and wastings of the whole body, which many 
times so alters it as if it was not the same Creature, caus- 
ing various and foolish actions, in so much as many have 
called their Children Changelings, the alteration in their 
outward form as well as of the mind has been so great." 
He enumerates twelve diseases; by touching people af- 
fected by them, bewitchment sickness will be produced 
by a mysteriously transferred power. Some of them 
are known as infectious diseases, like itch and leprosy; 
but think of the folly in the notion that a man suffering 
from common boils was able to " bewitch " another by 
the mere touch! In enumerating remedies, he names 
many substances which are to be worn about the sick, 
distinctly because " they are offensive to Devils." among 
them being mistletoe and ivy; but the majority of the 
prescriptions were substances to be worn amulet-wise 
about the neck. Among them were coral (lapis amian- 
thes}, grains of paris, and peony and rue, to defend 
from witchcraft, and especially to hang an amulet of 
loadstone, amber or red coal about the neck, as also 
carbuncles, sapphires and jacinths. Among minerals 
he commends gold (early form of gold cure), but 
especially native cinnabar and quicksilver to be hung 
against the pit of the stomach, having first been 
inclosed in a goose-quill, ''or which is said to be more 
sympathetical into a hazle-nut-shell and sealed up 
therein with wax " ; and he also recommends a ring 
made of an ass's hoof. Perhaps two hundred years 
from now, an electric finger-ring, worn as a remedy for 
rheumatism, will seem just as senseless and futile. In 
recommending prophylactic measures he quotes Porta 
as advising " to turn away the face of a Child that the 
witch may not fasten her Eyes on its Eyes, nor couple 
rays with the [child's] Eyes<" Salmon himself-who 
was living when the Durning of suspected witches in 
England was an every-day occurrence-says: 
" You must remove the Child from the cause, to hinder 
the Impression, and avoid the company of the supposed 
witch." 
Here it is only women who are supposed to have oc- 
cult powers-i. e., to be in league with the Devil; it was 
women only who were burned at Salem; and attention 
is here called to the fact that in the opprobrium which 
has been heaped on the forefathers for this act, it is 
lost sight of that in England, whence still emanated the 
ideas that dominated their lives, ten persons were 
burned as witches where one was in this country, no 
less than 3,000 persons being put to death for sorcery 
during the Long Parliament; and it was in America that 
a man-Judge Sewall-who had presided at the con- 
demnation of the witch in 1692, had the penetration to 
discover his error, and in 1696 had the humility and 
magnanimity to cause his public recantation of his 
error to be read from the pulpit. 
It is natural to ask why, when there was a witch, 
we find no corresponding wizard. The true reason 
runs far back in the centuries, and touches the history 
of all tribes and nations. The care of the sick and the 
knowledge of remedies in all the old barbaric nations 
was intrusted to the women; it was passed down from 
generation to generation in traditions, and the possess- 
ors of the knowledge accumulated in successive eras 
were looked upon as having mystical, if not superna- 
tural powers; and, to quote Petersen: 
" it was quite natural that with old, ugly women, to the 
eyes of young, suffering and impatient men this mystical- 
ness should assume the aspect of wickedness." 
The theologians explained it by Satan's seduction of 8 
1324 
THE INDEPENDENT 
Eve. However we explain it, there is the fact that the 
fin de siecle, in the century that brought the forefathers 
across the ocean, was lighted up by the fires of witch 
burnings and religious persecutions, and blessed are 
those born after their lurid flames had died down. An- 
other mystical element was mingled with the medicine of 
that time-astrology. Salmon, in giving directions for 
the hanging of disease-defying amulets about the necks 
of his bewitched patients, says: 
" These you may hang about the neck when Luna is in 
conjunction with Mercury in his own House, and they both 
in time to Sol, and, if possible, to Jupiter, also; not forget- 
ting to anoint the Pained with some of those Oils of Hy- 
pericon, aforesaid." 
As inunctions of oil do abate those pinings caused by 
the true starvation that follows upon irritability of the 
alimentary apparatus, perhaps his patients improved. 
The toad figured largely in the materia medica of the 
time; and for the plague he commends 
" the amulet of quicksilver, also a dried toad sewed up in 
a piece of silk and hung at the pit of the heart. Arsenic 
pure, not mixt with any other body lest its virtue be abated 
is profitable applied to the same place, wrapt up in silk; but 
it ought not to be heated lest it penetrate through the 
Pores into the Body." 
Among the influences that may cause the plague he 
enumerates comets, eclipses, the major and minor con- 
junctions and oppositions of the planets and other 
" ill Configurations of the Celestial bodies, and all these 
happening in the Sixth, Eighth, or Twelfth Houses of the 
Revolution of the world." 
Puerile as these things seem, he talks like a man of 
sense when describing the course and symptoms of the 
Great Plague, saying: 
" All which I can affirm from my own Experience who 
was an eye-witness thereof, during the whole last great 
Plague in London Anno 1665, in which died more than a 
hundred thousand. My constant visiting of the sick even 
some thousands of them through the whole course of the 
Plague has given me a more experimental knowledge of 
that disease than all that I have ever learned from any 
Author or Tutor whatsoever." 
It seems that the times were taken advantage of by 
men who made anti-pestilential " salts " and " drinks"; 
and Salmon gives a list of hundreds of prescriptions, 
some containing twenty or more ingredients, and many 
preservatives, and some excellent sanitary directions; 
e. g., not to handle garments or quilts used about those 
who have died, etc.; and in his " Lastly" he says: 
" The pestilence is the Rod of God, and Man cannot fly 
from the presence of the Almighty or Beyond the reach of 
His Power, therefore as the greatest and chiefest thing; 
that every Man and Woman turn from their evil Ways, 
from all their Vices, Wickednesses, and Abominations and 
daily manifold offences, whether public or hidden by which 
God Almighty is provoked to wrath, and to manifest his 
displeasure in the destruction of mortals, yet retributing 
upon their heads but a small portion of their Crimes and 
Impieties, for as much as without such a speedy return 
and amendment, no trust or security can be put in any 
Caution, Preservative, or Antidote, what or how prudently 
soever composed." 
Two hundred years later than when these works 
were written, Dr. Kitasato investigated' this identical 
plague at Hongkong, discovered its specific microbe, 
which paid no attention to what house any of the planets 
were in, but promptly infested those whose blood was 
not strong enough to withstand it. Now news comes 
from Japan, that he has found a serum, bearing the 
same relation to it that antitoxin does to diphtheria. 
Between the "simples" of the foremothers, consist- 
ing of an herb, often bitter or nauseous, steeped in 
water or vinegar, or " spirits," and the prescriptions of 
the learned physicians of England, often consisting of 
twenty ingredients, there is a wide difference. The first 
did no harm, but cleared the way at times for Nature's 
own restorative work; and hidden, among the mulitudi- 
ous ingredients of the latter, we often find a trifle of 
mercury, or antimony or arsenic, and poppy juice, and 
occasionally opium. In the century 1700 to 1806 came 
a revolution in dosage for which the world is largely 
indebted to Germany; for there the medicinal metals 
were studied, caught and tamed, so to speak, and 
adapted to the healing of mankind. 
It is difficult to trace the claims of mineral remedies 
as compared with the vegetable, and the list of the most 
efficient remedies that the modern physician depends 
mainly upon, is about equally divided between vegeta- 
bles and minerals, tho the place formerly accorded to 
opium would, now that bichlorid of mercury is the 
most universally used antiseptic, be disputed by many. 
While the condensing and simplifying of medicines 
was going on in the last century, so that the "shot- 
gun" prescription-containing so many ingredients 
that some one must " hit " if all the other " missed," 
could be abolished, what may be called " healing by an 
attack from the outside " was discovered, in the prac- 
tice of defeating the smallpox by inserting a prophy- 
lactic virus of the same disease in 1717, and the im- 
measurable improvement on that, of vaccination, intro- 
duced just a century since in 1796, and constituting a 
glorious medical fin de siecle for the preceding hundred 
years. 
To this day the prejudice against mercurials, etc., 
survives in the appeal of the patent-medicine vender, of 
a " purely vegetable " remedy; but the man who has 
had most uncomfortable symptoms subdued by a few 
small white tablets, will not care to drink quarts of 
bitter vegetable concoctions, and as to animal remedies, 
they are repulsive to the last degree; vipers'-flesh, es- 
sence of vipers, crabs' eyes, crabs' claws and toads be- 
ing recommended by Salmon, while Dr. Winthrop (Bos- 
ton, 1643) dwells with complacency on " my black 
powder " against the plague, smallpox, etc., which was 
made by putting live toads into an earthen pot so as to 
half fill it, and then baking them or burning them in the 
open air " till they could be reduced by pounding to a 
powder." Let us all be glad that a phial with a few 
small tablets holds the potential curative ability of 
myriads of toads and vipers; and when we wish to pass 
into an ecstasy of gratitude let us reflect on anesthetics 
-the production of temporary insensibility at will- 
safely, quickly, pleasantly, which Dr. Holmes calls 
" one of those triumphs over the infirmities of our mor- 
tal condition which change the aspect of life ever after- 
wards."