Probably from the earliest times man would be led to observe the behaviour of animals when suffering from disease or injury. If he could not learn much from them in the way of medicine, they could teach him many useful arts. In savage man we must seek the beginnings of our civilization, and it is in the lowest tribes and those which have not yet felt the influences of superior races that we must search for the most primitive forms of medical ideas and the earliest theories and treatment of disease.
Sir John Lubbock says:[10] “It is a common opinion that savages are, as a general rule, only the miserable remnants of nations once more civilized; but although there are some well-established cases of natural decay, there is no scientific evidence which would justify us in asserting that this applies to savages in general.”
Dr. E. B. Tylor, in his fascinating work on Primitive Culture, says:[11] “The thesis which I venture to sustain, within limits, is simply this—that the savage state in some measure represents an early condition of mankind, out of which the higher culture has gradually been developed or evolved by processes still in regular operation as of old, the result showing that, on the whole, progress has far prevailed over relapse. On this proposition the main tendency of human society during its long term of existence has been to pass from a savage to a civilized state. It is mere matter of chronicle that modern civilization is a development of mediæval civilization, which again is a development from civilization of the order represented in Greece, Assyria, or Egypt. Then the higher culture being clearly traced back to what may be called the middle culture, the question which remains is, whether this middle culture may be traced back to the lower culture, that is, to savagery.”
Providing we can find our savage pure and uncontaminated, it matters little where we seek him; north, south, east, or west, he will be practically the same for our purpose.
Dr. Robertson says: “If we suppose two tribes, though placed in the most remote regions of the globe, to live in a climate nearly of the same temperature, to be in the same state of society, and to resemble each other in the degree of their improvement, they must feel the same wants, and exert the same endeavours to supply them.... In every part of the earth the progress of man has been nearly the same, and we can trace him in his career from the rude simplicity of savage life, until he attains the industry, the arts, and the elegance of polished society.”[12]
Writing of the primitive folk, the Eastern Inoits, Elie Reclus tells us that,[13] “shut away from the rest of the world by their barriers of ice, the Esquimaux, more than any other people, have remained outside foreign influences, outside the civilization whose contact shatters and transforms. They have been readily perceived by prehistoric science to offer an intermediate type between man as he is and man as he was in bygone ages. When first visited, they were in the very midst of the stone and bone epoch,[14] just as were the Guanches when they were discovered; their iron and steel are recent, almost contemporary importations. The lives of Europeans of the Glacial period cannot have been very different from those led amongst their snow-fields by the Inoits of to-day.”
CHAPTER II.
ANIMISM.
Who discovered our Medicines?—Anthropology can assist us to answer the Question.—The Priest and the Medicine-man originally one.—Disease the Work of Magic.—Origin of our Ideas of the Soul and Future Life.—Disease-demons.
Cardinal Newman, in his sermon on “The World’s Benefactors,” asks, “Who was the first cultivator of corn? Who first tamed and domesticated the animals whose strength we use, and whom we make our food? Or who first discovered the medicinal herbs, which from the earliest times have been our resource against disease? If it was mortal man who thus looked through the vegetable and animal worlds, and discriminated between the useful and the worthless, his name is unknown to the millions whom he has thus benefited.