daily, such things impressed careful men, who noted
what had best helped the sick, then began to prescribe
them. In this way medicine had its rise from
the experience of the recovery of some, of the death
of others, distinguishing the hurtful from the salutary
things” (Book I). The association of ideas
was suggestive—the plant eyebright was used
for centuries in diseases of the eye because a black
speck in the flower suggested the pupil of the eye.
The old herbals are full of similar illustrations
upon which, indeed, the so-called doctrine of signatures
depends. Observation came, and with it an ever
widening experience. No society so primitive
without some evidence of the existence of a healing
art, which grew with its growth, and became part of
the fabric of its organization.
With primitive medicine, as such, I cannot deal, but
I must refer to the oldest existing evidence of a
very extraordinary practice, that of trephining.
Neolithic skulls with disks of bone removed have been
found in nearly all parts of the world. Many
careful studies have been made of this procedure,
particularly by the great anatomist and surgeon, Paul
Broca, and M. Lucas-Championniere has covered the subject
in a monograph.(2) Broca suggests that the trephining
was done by scratching or scraping, but, as Lucas-Championniere
holds, it was also done by a series of perforations
made in a circle with flint instruments, and a round
piece of skull in this way removed; traces of these
drill-holes have been found. The operation was
done for epilepsy, infantile convulsions, headache,
and various cerebral diseases believed to be caused
by confined demons, to whom the hole gave a ready method
of escape.
(2) Lucas-Championniere:
Trepanation neolithique, Paris,
1912.
The practice is still extant. Lucas-Championniere
saw a Kabyle thoubib who told him that it was quite
common among his tribe; he was the son of a family
of trephiners, and had undergone the operation four
times, his father twelve times; he had three brothers
also experts; he did not consider it a dangerous operation.
He did it most frequently for pain in the head, and
occasionally for fracture.
The operation was sometimes performed upon animals.
Shepherds trephined sheep for the staggers. We
may say that the modern decompression operation, so
much in vogue, is the oldest known surgical procedure.
Out of the ocean of oblivion, man emerges in
history in a highly civilized state on the banks of
the Nile, some sixty centuries ago. After millenniums
of a gradual upward progress, which can be traced in
the records of the stone age, civilization springs
forth Minerva-like, complete, and highly developed,
in the Nile Valley. In this sheltered, fertile
spot, neolithic man first raised himself above his
kindred races of the Mediterranean basin, and it is
suggested that by the accidental discovery of copper
