“Homo est medicus, et ex homine medicina paratur,” said Flemming, in his “De Remediis ex corpore humano desumtis,” that is to say, man being a doctor, from man medicine is prepared.
The savage, with all his fear of the vague and indefinable, had still a wonderful belief in himself as the greatest of nature’s works; all his great gods he created in his own image and likeness; he went even further, and ascribed to the priests or representatives of the gods, the same respect and veneration as were supposed to be due to the gods themselves; hence arose man-worship, still existing in Thibet in its most pronounced form, and surviving in Europe down to the present generation almost, in the modification known as “touching for the king’s evil,” which touching derived its efficacy from the double belief that all ailments were sent from some supernatural, and, generally, maleficent, source, and could, therefore, best be cured by the imposition of the hands of an individual whom the inunction of a little consecrated fat had bound more closely to the Omnipotent.[101]
This belief cropped out in charms and talismans, which were nothing more nor less than medicines to avert bad luck and remedy disease, itself a manifestation of bad luck; or, to express the idea still more clearly, medicines themselves were nothing but charms originally, in the application of which our forefathers paid less attention to pharmaceutical properties than they did to those of an occult or “sympathetic” nature which their own ignorance attributed to them.
Animals and plants and stones, being objects of worship, were naturally enough called upon to furnish remedies for all ailments, and palliatives for every misfortune. The grandest animal of all, man, could not well be omitted from the Materia Medica; every thing that pertains to either sex, either in structure or in function, must have impressed the untutored mind with a sense of awe; all excretions, solid or fluid, were invested with mystic properties, and called into requisition upon occasions of special import.
On the subject of man-worship, consult Frazer, “The Golden Bough,” vol. i. c. 2, pp. 8, 9.
“Among the negroes, royalty is deified; kings are supposed to be of the race of gods, and, after death, become demi-gods.”—(“Fetichism,” Baudin, p. 24.)
Saliva, the ordure, urine, catamenial fluid, blood, bile, calculi, bones, skulls,—all were mysterious, and therefore were “medicine,” especially when obtained from a saint or lama.
This belief subsisted among tribes and communities long after civilization of a high type had been attained, and is probably what Saint Mark alludes to in an ambiguous passage, when he says, “It is not the things which enter a man’s body, but those which come out of it, which defile him.”
Again, it is not from the bodies of the living alone, but from the corpses of the dead likewise, that medicinal preparations were derived; but in the latter case there enters into the question another expression of thought, shared by primitive man in all countries and in all ages; i. e., that the part is ever the representative of the whole, and that when the whole cannot be obtained, the part will be equally efficacious. Hence the precious care with which, in all communities in a low state of culture, the bones, teeth, rags of clothing, and other exuviæ of the sacred dead have been treasured.