Concord!, or, Medical men and manners of the nineteenth century / by Atithasseutos.

  • Atithasseutos.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Concord!, or, Medical men and manners of the nineteenth century / by Atithasseutos. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    reasonably infer that it existed abundantly from the allusions to particular kinds of it, such as “ pythonical ” or “ divining,” which we find in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, 1 Kings, and in the .New Testament in Acts xvi. Such being the wanderings—moral and philosophical—of God’s chosen people, it may occasion but little marvel to find among the outer barbarians the very same strange practices to have been most common. The Syrians had a deity whom they named Abracadabra, and this queer word, when written triangularly and worn round the neck, was deemed by many peoples, and down to modern times, potent to ward off disease. Tlie ancient Greeks used a (f>v\a/cTr]p[,ov or reXea/ia for the same purpose ; and the Romans had their amuleti. But as if all these were not enough, they both employed the charms of music—mostly that of the pipes—to cure many diseases, notably sciatica. If the afflicted one could be by the music made to dance, so as to cause him to sweat thoroughly, I can well believe in the wondrous cures it worked sometimes; at any rate, it could do no harm, as there are few things better fitted to drive away dull care, to correct melancholy by provoking the liver to a healthy action, and so disperse the kindred humours of gout and rheumatism, than the skirl of the pipes in a lively jig or reel. That human nature is generally the same in all ages, and at all places, is a threadbare platitude. The modern philosopher, with his theory of evolution and his doctrine of superior and inferior races, exaggerated, may affect to laugh at the intelligence of the men of three or four thousand years ago, who made for themselves pipers and fiddlers so expert, that besides charming the inhabitants of the infernal regions, they could make the very trees or stones perform to a reel or hornpipe; or the same men who, steeped in paganism and entangled in the worship of dragons and serpents, created for them- selves a Thoth or Mercurius, who, with winged ears and heels, and caduceus in hand, conducted the souls of the dead across the Styx. To the scientific among modern thinkers all this is very absurd, no doubt; and yet, have we so very much improved as a people as to enable us to laugh at the folly, and “ mummery and superstition ” of the ancients ? Perhaps we have : but it is still true, nevertheless, that in this land of philosophers, evolutionists, and Christians; of churches, Bibles, and school boards; and in this last half of the nineteenth century there still lingers an amazing remnant of ignorance, folly, and superstition in the form of fortune-telling and charming. We know that Scott, with a poet’s license, utilised very largely these superstitions to make his writings more attractive ; but we also know that there are men and women in England to-day who pass for intelligent, or at least who don’t reside in madhouses, and who repair in health, in broadcloth and silks, to certain “ wise” people to have their for-