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massage". Of fumigation we find a typical instance in the Apocrypha, where Tobias frees his bride from a demon by fumigating her with a fish's heart and liver, "the which smell, when the evil spirit had smelled, he fled into the uttermost parts of Egypt". Nor is this unconnected with our present subject, for we shall find that the mediæval physician looked upon Tobias's angel guide as his especial guardian, and that many of his drugs were well calculated to produce effects similar to those of the famous fish liver. It is not impossible that the belief, so common among hospital patients, that a "strong" medicine must, of necessity, be a very nauseous one, may be traceable to a similar origin.

But there is another and a less unpleasant mode of expelling a demon; he may be provided with a more appropriate dwelling-place. Thus, in the Vedas, those most ancient monuments of Aryan literature, the demon of jaundice is entreated to depart into a yellow bird, and the chilly spirit of ague to take up his abode in the frog, while in later times the very sight of the golden oriole was considered sufficient to cure the former disease. We may be able to trace a relation between this form of the demonic theory, and the mediæval doctrine of" signatures," and shall perhaps find it not altogether unconnected with the still more famous medical dogma: "Likes are cured by likes ".

Thirdly, there are persons endowed with power over the spirits of disease, who are able by charms and incantations to expel them from the patient's body, and in them we may not improbably see the first germ of the medical profession. It is usually asserted that the first physicians were priests; it would perhaps be equally true to say that the first priests were physicians. The savage appears to derive his ideas of higher existences, not so much from the starry heavens above, or the moral law within, as from those powers of nature which affect him physically, and especially from those which cause disease, and in his dealings with this spirit world, he looks primarily to those who, as he believes,

can prevent or cure disease; his priests, in short, are "medicine men ".

But may not those who have acquired such power over the spirits of sickness cause diseases as well as cure them? This brings us to that belief in witchcraft, the universality and terrible results of which amongst uncivilised races, is one of the saddest revelations of modern anthropology. We cannot here do more than mention this important aspect of the demonic theory of disease, nor need we trace it to its modern development. It is no curious old belief dug up by antiquaries to interest the student, or amuse the "general reader," but beyond parallel the most terrible delusion which has ever afflicted mankind. Within one century in Christian Europe alone, it brought torture and death to many thousands of innocent beings, and the amount of physical and mental agony caused by the belief in witchcraft through the long ages of man's early development passes all human estimation.

That diseases are often ascribed to departed spirits is a fact familiar to all students of folk-lore, and we shall meet with a curious instance of it in discussing the practice of medicine in ancient Egypt.

The supposed disease-producing power of the spirits of animals affords the simplest explanation of one of the most extraordinary customs of uncivilised man, that of the "couvade," or of the husband's lying-in when his wife has a baby. This strange habit, first noticed by Diodorus and Strabo as occurring in Corsica and the Pyrenees, has been found by modern observers among primitive races in every quarter of the globe. That a mother and her new-born child are peculiarly exposed to the attacks of evil spirits is a very wide-spread belief, originating, perhaps, in their great liability to diseases, and we find that in some races the husband refrains from hunting altogether at these times, lest the spirits of the injured animals should attack the helpless infant. It seems not impossible that he might sometimes go a step further, and, finding himself debarred from his usual

occupation on these interesting occasions, conclude that he must in some way be seriously affected by the event, and proceed to treat himself accordingly.

NOTE.

It must not be supposed that the medicine of uncivilised man is exclusively "demonic". Most tribes possess such surgical skill as is required for the rough treatment of fractures and dislocations, while some also employ bleeding, cupping, and vapour baths. Not a few of the drugs in our modern pharmacopoeia were first used by savages, as for example senega, lobelia, guaiacum, ipecacuanha, though unfortunately the numerous travellers' tales of wonderful remedies known to barbarous races have seldom survived investigation.

The above explanation of the “couvade,” for which I am indebted to Dorman, Origin of Primitive Superstitions (Philadelphia, 1881), is not that usually accepted (see Lubbock, Origin of Civilisation, p. 17, and Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 293). When a Chinese baby is born its father's trousers are hung upside down in order that any stray demons may go into them and not into the child (Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. 149). What the Dacotah Indian most dreads is that some animal's spirit will enter his body and make him sick. Toothache is attributed by the Dacotahs to the spirit of the woodpecker. An old Dacotah explained his son's sore eyes by the fact that thirty years before, when his son was a boy, he had speared a minnow with a pin on a stick, but he thought it strange that the fish's spirit should have waited so long for its revenge. In Brazil the chiefs act as physicians, and first ask their patients if they have injured any animal, tortoise, deer, etc. (Dorman, op. cit.). For diseases caused by departed spirits see Black, Folk Medicine, and for the whole subject Bartels, Die Medicin der Naturvölker, Leipzig, 1893.

IV. MEDICINE IN ANCIENT EGYPT.

AMONG the "mastabas" or tombs of Egyptian grandees which surround the pyramids of Sakkarah is one, small and unpretending in appearance, but remarkable for the beauty and perfection of its inscription. This shows the tomb to be that of Sekhet'enanch, chief physician to the Pharaoh Sahura of the fifth dynasty (B.C. 3533 ?), and describes how

THE FIRST KNOWN PHYSICIAN.

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he had healed the king's "nostrils," for which his Majesty wishes him "a long life in holiness". "Then the chief physician spoke before Pharaoh: 'May it please thy soul beloved of Ra, that there be given me a limestone slab like a door for this my tomb in the West-land'. Then the king commanded, and they brought unto him two stone slabs like a double door from the quarry Ro'an, and they were set up in the court of his palace Chaurert-Sahura. The chief taskmaster made the temple masons inscribe them as for the king himself. The Court visited them daily. His Majesty ordered the inscription to be done over with bluestone." This appears to be the first mention of a physician in history; for, though the older Egyptian dates are uncertain that given above being the one accepted by Brugsch and the British Museum authorities--few modern Egyptologists would place the fifth dynasty later than B.C. 3000, and we may safely assert that the interval between Sekhet'enanch and Hippocrates was at least as great as that which separates the "Father of Medicine" from our own day. Physicians, as a class, are referred to in still more ancient inscriptions under the term "snu," a word represented hieroglyphically by what seem to be a lancet and cupping instrument.

1

Who were these first practitioners of what may be called civilised medicine? The generally accepted theory is that all early physicians, and especially the Egyptian, were priests; but, though in later times the practice of medicine in Egypt was undoubtedly confined to the sacerdotal class, this was by no means necessarily the case at the period now under consideration. Society had then a more patriarchal character; every one was in some sense a priest, the judges of the Goddess of Truth, the officials of the god specially worshipped by the reigning Pharaoh, and the physicians of Sekhet, the lion-headed Goddess of War, to whom in these earliest ages the origin of medicine was attributed; 2 but their civil offices were always the most prominent, and there was in addition a separate sacerdotal class to whom the

highest and lowest religious functions were entrusted.

The disappearance of the "lay element" and the development of this sacerdotal class till it absorbed the professions of scribe, judge, and physician, and finally invaded the throne itself, form the keynote of Egyptian history. The Egyptian physician as met with in Greek writers is primarily a priest, but his special divinity is no longer the war goddess, but Thoth, the God of Wisdom and Writing; he has thrown away his lancet and cupping-horn, and abhors bleeding, for do not the sacred writings declare that the blood is the life? And these writings he must follow in all things, for, should a patient die after treatment not in harmony with them, his own life may pay the penalty.

3

Returning to the freer times of the old empire, we must travel far down the ages after Sahura before meeting with another interesting relic of Egyptian medicine. This is the domestic medicine chest of the wife of the Pharaoh Mentu'hotep of the eleventh dynasty, about B.C. 2500, not many centuries before Abraham; it contains six vases, one of alabaster and five of serpentine, with dried remnants of drugs, two spoons, a piece of linen cloth, and some roots, enclosed in a basket of straw-work, the whole standing in a wooden chest found in the queen's tomb. We may also mention here, as indicating the less formal character of the older medical practice, a curious letter from a husband to his dead wife, found attached to a small image of the latter. In it he upbraids the departed spirit for having produced disease in him, and while reproachfully calling to mind his kindnesses to her during life, thus describes her last illness: "When thou wast sick, with the sickness that thou hadst, did not I go to the physician and bid him make thy medicines for thee?—yea, he did all things whatsoever thou wouldst have him do ".5 This seems to imply that the lady to some extent directed her own treatment, and reminds us of the Homeric description of Egypt as the land where "each one is a physician, skilful beyond all men, for verily they are of the race of Paeon". But our chief source of information is