On superstitions connected with the history and practice of medicine and surgery / by Thomas Joseph Pettigrew.

Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On superstitions connected with the history and practice of medicine and surgery / by Thomas Joseph Pettigrew. 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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    with the priests. In early and superstitious ages, as already shown, diseases were regarded as inflictions of the divine vengeance ; and means were therefore sought to appease the anger of the gods, and mitigate the celestial wrath. Appeals to the oracles, divination, and magic henceforth became connected with medicine. Hippocrates was the first physician to relieve medicine from the tram- mels of superstition and the delusions of philosophy. Nothing could tend more to retard the progress of medicine, and paralyse all efforts for its improvement, than the opinion, once so generally entertained, of the celestial origin of disease, which, if admitted, appears necessarily to demand divine interposition for its relief. Religion and medicine were both brought into contempt by the adoption of sacrifices and incantations, and the mercenaiy practices of the priests to insure intercession with the gods. Hippocrates resisted this folly and wicked- ness, and boldly declared that no disease whatever came from the gods, but owed its origin to its own natural a id manifest cause. Even the learned Celsus, whose works are universally read and admired at the present day, whose writings are considered as forming a conspicuous portion of our standard medical literature, was not free of the prejudices of his time, with regard to the origin of dis- ease. In the preface to his work, f De Re Medica,’ he ex- pressly says, “ Morbos ad iram deorum immortalium re- latos esse, et ab iisdem opem posci solitam.” He, how- ever, had too much good sense not to rely upon remedies as his curative agents, and, therefore, writes “ Morbi, non eloquentia sed remediis curantur.” The religion of the ancient Egyptians was a kind of pantheism; they believed that the Divine Spirit was the soul of the world; yet some of their deities appear to have been worshipped by them and adored as supreme intelli-