The nose and throat in medical history / by Jonathan Wright.

  • Wright, Jonathan, 1860-1928.
Date:
[1898?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The nose and throat in medical history / by Jonathan Wright. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the incantations and the invocations of good and evil spirits, which would indicate that our art among them was about on a level with that of the American Indians. In the satires of Juvenal we find Chaldean magic much cultivated by the decadent social world of Rome against which he aimed his shafts. “Chaldeis sed major eritfiducia; quicquid Dixerat astrologus, credent a fonte relatum Hammonis. (VI. 552.) In the popularity of theosophy and the mind cure and the faith cure we have in our day a parallel to the condition at Rome so far as the mystic influences of the Far East are concerned. It is impossible for us to stretch our credulity to the point of believ- ing Herodotus when he asserts that the Babylonians had no physi- cians, but depended on the wisdom of the market place, where the patients were exposed for the benefit of the comments of passers- by. Familiarity with human nature compels us to believe that even if they possessed no medical knowledge they must have possessed men who pretended to it, and others who believed in their assertions, for as Celsus remarked, “Medicina nusquam non est.” According to Sayce (Hibbert Lectures, 1887, P. 84,) dog’s flesh and the ordure of animals were among Chaldean medicaments, and such things we find in abundance in the “Papyros Ebers.” These disgusting drugs we will again find recommended in the works of Galen, yEtius and Oribasius, among those prescribed in- ternally and even for internal local applications in throat disease. We can perhaps therefore understand Juvenal’s objections to the Chaldeans, and we may see from his mention how these articles crept into the later medical writings of the Roman Empire and sub- sequently appeared among the drugs of the Middle Ages, thus transferred from the plains of Mesopotamia to the banks of the Rhine and the Thames. The belief in the efficacy of precious stones as medicaments is first found in the accounts of Babylonian medicine and existed far into the Renaissance as costly articles of the Pharmacopoeia. Mysterious invocations, gruesome and disgusting prescriptions occupy a prominent place in all records of primitive medicine, but apparently these with the cabalistic use of figures and signs have long lingered in the records of medicine and in literature as the Witch Medi- cine.