Ritual diseases / by Victor G. Plarr.

  • Plarr, Victor, 1863-1929.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ritual diseases / by Victor G. Plarr. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    733 and semi-suffocation often led to collapse and death. And then everybody was satisfied with the original diagnosis. Here, of course, we have an instance of a ritual disease deliberately manufactured. Among primitive savages death is often treated with ritual observances by the living, who accelerate if they do not produce it. Thus in Messrs. Spencer and Gillen’s „Northern Tribes of Central Australia” (1904) we have a strange account of the death-ritual among the Warramunga. A medicine-man of middle age is very ill of the dysentery, but his colleagues decide that the bone of a dead man is inside him. The lubras, and then the men of the tribe, prostrate themselves on his body, till „gradually the struggling mass of dark bodies began to loosen, and then we could see that the unfortunate man was not actually dead, though the terribly rough treatment to which he had been subjected had sealed his fate.” Such rituals of death, based upon a wrong conception of the nature of death as of something accidental, must have been common among innumerable savage tribes in many ages. Akin to them are the rituals of birth, and our own deathsigns, of which latter Mistress Quickly gives some account when describing the demise of Sir John Falstaff. „For after I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his fingers ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a’ babbled of green fields” („Henry the Fifth”, Act. II, Scene 3). With this we may compare the Signs of Death as set forth in an old work on „Domestic-Medicine” or rather chapbook of recipes, „A Thousand Notable Things”, which continued to enjoy a vogue in country parts as late as the close of the eighteenth century. „If the forehead of the sick wax red, and his left eye become little, and the corner of his eye run, and his brows fall down, and his nose wax sharp coid .... if he will pull straws, or the clothes of his bed .... these are most certain tokens of death.” The ritual in both cases is the fumbling with the bed-clothes and the pulling at small objects — flowers in the poet’s description, straws in the chap-book. Tarantism, again, popularly held to be caused by the bite of the tarantula, a spider, and to be curable by dancing, is now shown to have been mainly a form of imitative chorea, of which twitching, easily suggestionised and metamorphosed into dancing, was a manifestation. The literature of this subject, already large, becomes vast if we count as forms of tarantism those many diseases, such as the malayan „Amok” and its kindred „Latah”, the Siberian Miryachit, the American Jumpers’,