The myth of medicine

PREFACE

Herbert M. Shelton was one of the world’s leading critics of Modern Medicine. He informed his readers of the many dangerous practices of Modem Medicine while advocating the practices of a system of health care called Natural Hygiene. From 1920 to 1985 he labored relentlessly in an effort to tell the world that health is built, not bought. Healthy people will bankrupt and destroy the drug industry: A successful drug industry will wreck health and shorten the lives of people who support the drug industry.

The cures can come and go but the curing goes on forever, he proclaimed. Many “wonder drugs” and “revolutionary procedures” soon disappeared when it was discovered that they did more harm than good. The physician is preoccupied with intervention rather than prevention, having an infatuation with drugs and technology, losing sight of good common sense.

Rubies in the Sand (now The Myth of Medicine) was written twelve years prior to an article in The Jewish Press (Brooklyn, New York, June 19, 1973) which carried the following item from Tel Aviv:

The number of funerals has dropped by nearly half since the doctor’s strike began last week, according to statistics released by Jerusalem Burial Society.

Statistics called from the archives of the Tel Aviv Burial Society showed a similar drop in the number of funerals 20 years ago when the doctors last went on strike...

When the physicians struck in Toronto and in Holland a few years later there was a similar drop in the death rate.

The fact that a great reduction in the number of funerals occurred so quickly after the strike began was not a coincidence, stated Shelton. He believed that physicians often bury their mistakes.

Shelton did not advocate that physicians have less compassion and integrity than the rest of humankind. He knew that there are needs for surgery and he states in this book, “A skilled surgeon, one who is both conscientious and understanding, is a valuable person to have around on numerous occasions.” Some physicians do save lives. They are at their best when challenged by medical emergencies. They are at their worst when they feel compelled to do something in order to satisfy themselves or the patient. Shelton likened the physician treating symptoms to that of a captain of a ship lost at sea, groping in the dark without a compass.

It is the teachings and principles of Modem Medicine that Shelton opposed. “An exulted genius,” Shelton said, “cannot do the right thing with the wrong tool.” In this volume he exposes that what is called “cure” of disease has brought disastrous consequences to millions. It is one thing to “cure” disease—it is quite another to restore the sick to health. Under drug treatment the symptoms may subside but in their places are left ailments that are often serious and sometimes fatal. Healing belongs to the living organism.

Shelton believed Natural Hygiene was superior to Modem Medicine. The practice of Natural Hygiene regarded building our inherent immune system within our physiology by living healthfully. Shelton taught us that health care is self-care and that we need to broaden our outlook in order to place responsibility for disease at a deeper level of consciousness where potential healing could be found. Shelton describes the Hygienic mentality in his prescription for an adequate supply of the normal requirements of healthy life—mental, physical and physiological rest, adequate food, fresh air, exercise, sunshine, warmth and cleanliness. Shelton looked for causes of impairment and removed them. Causative factors include every act, habit, indulgence, circumstance and material that either remotely or immediately impairs the structural integrity of the organism. Trying to remedy disease without removing the cause is like trying to sober a drunken man while he continues to drink.

“Go and educate the layman,” Shelton often said, for it is the layman who will think, listen and respond. Physicians on the other hand, he felt, were often blinded or brainwashed with an array of unfounded theories about sickness and disease. But the layman, particularly after going through a process of taking drugs, is often willing to turn to Nature’s own plan of care. Only Nature heals the body and has the inherent power to do so. In this book Shelton teaches that healing is a biological process, not an art. Healing is not something that is done for the living organism but something that the organism does for itself from within.

Shelton’s hygienic principles and teachings of the basic laws of life did not change in the sixty years he had brought them to the attention of the public. Although Shelton never proclaimed to have all the answers to disease, health and healing, over a period of time, the hygienic principles he advocated were proven correct and validated. In years past, he was called a quack. And most often his teachings were called quackery by members of the medical profession. Today the dissent in Medicine is not different, but Shelton’s works are now avant garde in health reform.

I recall a conversation with Dr. Shelton at his once famous health school in San Antonio, Texas. It was the early 1980’s. Dr. Shelton communicated to me with great enthusiasm and emotion his desire to update, reprint and finish the new Foreword to a second edition of Rubies in the Sand. At the time, many orders and inquiries as to where to purchase his book were being sent to Shelton. But the work was unfortunately out of print. He wanted so much to have the book available to the public.

After Shelton’s death in 1985, the project laid dormant for nine years. Then John Lodi, a retired printer/publisher, saw the need to carry on what Shelton was unable to finish in his lifetime. Lodi had been receiving frequent requests for the whereabouts of Shelton’s classic. Many thanks to Lodi for carrying out one of Shelton’s last wishes. Here at last the work lives on.

To those who ask questions such as:

Is this surgery really necessary?

Will a new illness develop from the side effects of this drug? One perhaps that is worse than the one for which I am being treated?

What is the danger involved in taking this immunization?

Can this be an outpatient procedure or does it require a stay overnight in a hospital?

Is it better to die with dignity at home surrounded by family rather than choose an eleventh hour means of medical life support?

Then this is the book for you. And to those who desire to know the circumstances surrounding the beginnings of the medical system, then this is the book for you to discover for yourself what is myth and what is truth.

—Jean A. Oswald September, 1994 Author, Yours for Health: The Life and Times of Herbert M. Shelton

Jlm. valid system of mind-body care must not be a fabricated system that some group of men have woven together out of disrelated elements, but must be constituted of the very elemental factors of life itself. It must have its roots deep in *the daily life of the plant and animal world; it must be an essential part of the life world. It must be both universal and eternal in its application; it cannot be a mere fragment of truth, but must be truth itself. It must be permeated by a unifying principle that sets each factor-element of a sound system of care into its proper place and thereby creates a grand harmony and an easily understood system.

A system of care that satisfies such enormous demands cannot be of an ephemeral nature nor can it be something that is susceptible of merely local application. It must not aim merely at one special condition of the human body and mind, one special field of organic existence, but must meet in all of its details, all of the conditions of existence. Indeed, it cannot be partial to any one form of life or to anything that has to do with the support of life.

It must be founded in the very constitution of being; it must meet all the basic needs of life; of all life, both in health and in sickness; it must be susceptible of adjustment that it may be precisely fitted to the varying conditions and needs of life under all of its various and varying circumstances and conditions. In the very nature of things, it must have been part of the life of the world from the beginning of life on this earth.

Such a system can rest only upon true principles, hence it will be absolutely identical for each and every human being, without regard to race, creed or color, without reference to climate, altitude, age, sex or occupation. Such valid principles will form the rules of its application and serve to harmonize its elemental factors. Such a system does exist and has always existed and constituted the primitive way of life of man. A return to the primal way of existence and a casting off of the artificial fabrications of man will lead man back to his pristine perfection.

FOREWORD

The first edition of this little book was published under the simple title, Rubies In The Sand. It is presented here unchanged except for this Foreword and the Addendum. The book was originally written in an effort to uncover from the sands of time precious jewels of truth about health, disease and healing and to discover, if possible, the means of preserving and restoring health that were so successfully employed by our primeval forebears before the origin of the first shaman, priest and physician. It is a source of much satisfaction to the writer that he was eminently successful in this effort. It is also gratifying to know that mankind never actually lost these precious jewels. They have simply been pushed aside and neglected while all the emphasis has been placed upon anti-vital, inhuman and unnatural methods and systems that have been offered as substitutes for nature’s own plan of care. The system of Natural Hygiene that I have stressed in the following pages is not a new discovery, but a revival.

Hygiene is the employment of materials, activities and influences that have a normal relation to life, in the preservation and restoration of health. In other words, hygiene is the employment of nature’s own means of life in the care of lx>th the well and the sick.

Vegetarianism and other forms of dietary reform, physical culture, the various psychological and metaphysical movements, etc., are mere fragmentary approaches to the many and complex problems of life and are inadequate to meet the needs of modem life. Hygiene, by insisting upon an all-out approach to life’s problems and upon a total approach to these, constitutes a full system of mind-body care in both health and illth. Other systems resort to treatments, substitutes and compromises. All systems of so-called or alleged healing, both drug and drugless, employ therapeutic means and measures that bear no normal relation to life, fulfill no need of the living organism, and are positively harmful, while their use is predicated upon no known law of life.

What is the relationship between “remedies” and disease? Disease is remedial action. It is the effort of the living system to remove impurities and repair damages. The real remedy is that which enables the body to accomplish its work and that does not hinder or hamper the vital actions in any way. The means to do this are such proportions and combinations of hygienic materials and conditions as are exactly adapted to the degree and kind of needs and capacities of the sick organism.

Hygienists deny that there is any “law of cure” even that there is any such thing as cure, and declare that disease should not be cured. Disease being the effort of the living organism to restore the normal state, the causes which necessitate that effort should be removed in order that the effort may be successful; and the Hygienic System (hygienic because it employs only those means which are normally related to the living organism) consists in supplying favorable conditions, so that the effort to remove the causes of disease may accomplish its work, and restore the sick person to health.

Inasmuch as all sick people are’alike in important respects, the differences being matters of detail, so a few simple measures are useful and even necessary to all classes of people, well or sick. These needs are to be modified according to the invalid’s necessities, but the general principles of care are the same. The power to heal is innate and is a purely biological process. All too long have we ascribed the power to heal to something outside of the sick organism. It is true that we have substituted the term cure (originally meaning care) for the term heal, but the idea is still expressed—the cure is of foreign importation.

When it is denied that there is any law of cure, it must not be understood that there are no laws of life through the operations of which the processes of the living organism restore health. The living organism has within itself means of expelling poisons, of repairing damaged organs, of restoring function and recuperating energy. We say that there are conditions of recovery; conditions that must be supplied to the end that the inherent power of recuperation and restoration may work out the recovery of the sick.

Hygiene is not primarily interested in caring for the sick, but in the promotion and preservation of health. We can do this best by extending a knowledge of the principles upon which health depends. Hygiene is based upon the laws of life, and an observance of these laws will secure the health of all who are willing to learn and use them.

It is necessary to understand at the very outset that what is not inherently adapted to our sustenance cannot be made suitable to our needs and compatible with our structures and functions. In the very facts of digestion we discover a coordinated fitness between man and nature which is more clearly detected the more we look at it. It becomes a deep well of truth to draw upon in the sciences and especially in the science of physiology. Only those elements of external nature that are compatible with the inner structures and functions of the living body are susceptible of being used in the building and repair of living structure and in the performance of organic function.

The key to robust life, to functional vigor, to the preservation and recovery of health, to the solutions of the problems of invalidism, lies in an understanding of the normal means by which life is evolved and maintained. As sure as effects follow causes in any and all departments of nature, an understanding of the causes that lead to the evolution of disease will enable us to remove these and provide the causes of health, and thus restore health. In any true science of health it is impossible to separate the preservation of health from its recovery —prevention from remedy. To suppose there is something essentially different between maintaining health and restoring it is absurd. Who knows how to get well knows also how to keep well, and who knows how to keep well has learned the first and most important lesson of the art of getting well.

It is a cardinal principle of Hygiene that whatever is introduced into or applied to the body, if it is to do good, to save and not destroy, must hold to the human body, relations that are naturally congenial, so that its influence, when taken in health, shall be good and not disease-producing. As vital structure can be evolved only out of food, air, water and sunshine, we can distinguish between food and poison without reference to popular opinions.

The structure and vitality of an organism depend upon an adequate and proportionate supply of the organic constituents and the normal conditions of life in general. The materials of nutrition and of healthful functional action are the true remedial means. When health has been lost, the means of restoring it are found in a change of habits rather than in a change of locality. This is to say, climate and other things that one associates with changed locations are less important than habits. The same materials and influences are required to recover health as to maintain it, only in different proportions and qualities, hence the rule: supply the sick system with whatever it can use under the circumstances.

The adjustment of the factors of living to the varying needs of the body is a continuous process, well or sick, and not something that is reserved for the sick organism. In health the body operates a maintenance service; in disease it seeks to restore health. Improvement in the health and strength of a sick person is often so immediate and spectacular when drugs are abandoned that it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the drugs were the chief cause of continued sickness. The improved health of the invalid is commonly attributed to the alleged operation of the drug, rather than to continuance of the causes of life.

There is no use trying to mix the Hygienic System with the drug system; it is like trying to mix truth with falsehood, oil with water. The fundamental principles of the two systems are the exact opposites of each other, just as their means of care are opposites. There is simply no affinity between them. The physician who attempts to use both systems and who relies upon drugs for part of his remedial resources will fail to make full use of hygienic means. If he has not full confidence in the Hygienic System, and has a severe case of disease to “treat” he will use hygienic means half-heartedly, even doubtingly to a certain extent, and then administer his drugs liberally. The man who has full confidence in Hygiene, both in its power to preserve and to

restore health, handles the same disease and he will bring the full resources of the Hygienic System into use to better purpose. Hygiene is not to be judged by the partial use to which it is put by those who attempt to mix the Hygienic System with the drug system.

The greatest discovery ever made in our knowledge of healing was not the discovery of the alleged healing properties of some noxious weed or of the curative virtue of fungi or mineral poisons, but that the remedial power resides in the living organism and not in things extrinsic to it. As a result of this discovery the search for cures should have ceased. It should have been recognized at once that a self-healing organism does not need and cannot use cures. All the healing power of which we know exists in and is part of the living organism. The healing processes are as much a part of the living organism as are the processes of digestion, assimilation, circulation, secretion, respiration and reproduction, and man cannot initiate, imitate or duplicate these processes. The health processes are identical with the orderly regular processes of living. There may be and usually are some slight modifications of these regular processes; a diminution of some, a dramatic exaggeration of others, but they are essentially the same processes. We live, and all processes of living are processes of maintaining the integrity of the organism in the face of constant wear and tear and frequent injury. Healing is integral to the living organism.

The man who understands this fact can look quietly on while the vital processes in the sick person’s own body are quietly and sometimes violently eradicating the toxin and repairing damages, not by the use of substances that have no normal relations to life, but by use of those same materials and conditions that are the constant source of its daily renewal, thus obeying the hygienic principle of health by healthful living.

INTRODUCTION

In the following pages I have endeavored to separate the many practices of mankind that have, heretofore, been classed as medicine, from the bewildering mishmash that the historians have created for us, into their logical classifications, and to set each element in its proper place. I have attempted to separate the normal, necessary practices and activities and instinctive behavior patterns of man from the magical practices of the shaman and each of these from the poison practices of the physicians. I have attempted to disentangle medicine from the system of magic from which it demonstrably evolved and from which the cleavage has never been quite complete. In all of this, I have endeavored to go beyond the medical “histories” and construct a fresh synthesis on a basis, both of historical and archeological data and biological and hygienic data that the historians persist in ignoring or ridiculing.

It has been observed that the synthesis achieved in one day requires years of previous analysis. The new synthesis here presented is the work of nearly four decades of analysis. I do not assert that this book could not have been written by some other hygienist (perhaps some other hygienist could have done a much better job), but I do assert that only a hygienist could have written it. Only one well versed in the principals and practices of Natural Hygiene could have separated the different practices of the past, one from the other, and resynthesized them in the manner that is here done. The reader is, therefore, invited to undertake a study of history such as he has never undertaken before, and, at the same time, to acquire a new and, what must appear to him to be, a radically different view of life and of man’s past insofar as our subject relates to his past.

I have undertaken to write this book in a modest effort to clear away the accumulated mental debris of centuries and to get down to an honest investigation of the genuine factors that build and sustain good health. Our aim is not, primarily, to gain a knowledge of the past as the archeologist, anthropologist and historian may seek such knowledge, but to understand the best that the ages have to offer us in the way of care of ourselves both in health and in sickness. If it be thought that the best means of solving such problems is a careful, even an exhaustive mastery of modem science, I reply that, while fundamentally, this is a correct position, modern science, insofar as it deals with the problems before us, is still in a more or less chaotic state and is, in most particulars, wedded to the past without a genuine understanding of that past. If we acquire an understanding of the fundamental and perennial problems of human life and focus our thinking upon this and direct our actions by this understanding, we may get further than we now are.

The term medicine, in the hands of the historian, is somewhat like the term astronomy in the same hands. Just as the term astronomy is frequently employed to designate the astrological lore of the ancients, so the term medicine is used in feference to ancient magical and sacerdotal practices. Medical as well as academic historians are guilty of this misuse of the term medicine, for it is only thus that they can provide the system of practices that is called the medical art with an ancient pedigree.

Antiquity, that universal passport to popular confidence, will not long serve the medical profession, for it is now shown in the pages of this book that its antiquity is not as great as is generally supposed and that most of what is called medical history is pure fabrication. I do not charge that medical men and historians have entered into any conspiracy to mislead the people, but I do say that they could not have done a better job of spreading confusion than they have done had they entered into such a conspiracy. I have shown that medicine is but a little over two thousand years old and I have shown that there are, and have always been, far better means for caring for the sick than those that are practiced by the men of medicine.

It is always best to know the truth, let the consequences of its admission be what they may. Is it, then, too much to expect that you, gentle reader, will listen candidly to what I am about to say and that you will give my statements that measure of reflection that the intrinsic importance of your sufferings would seem to warrant? I have no patience with that great mass of humanity who tend to follow the specialist, who suffer, as Seate says, with mental inertia, those who, in other words, find it much easier to accept than to investigate. These want tailored beliefs from the hands of others which they may put on without putting forth any effort of their own in their creation. They seem to want their tailored beliefs so carefully fitted by the experts that they may be accepted without alteration. They want something they can absorb from the “authorities.” I recognize no authority save truth; I refuse to accept authority for truth.

As long as our so-called thinkers take the unwarranted position that the road to truth must be through certain approved and pre-determined channels and no other, many vital truths will be missed and ignored by men who are supposed to be leaders in their fields of knowledge. Even the specialist who has done considerable thinking in his own field, who may, as a matter of fact, have done something outstanding, is prone to be very orthodox in all fields outside of his own specialty. As amazing as it may seem, the greatest of our specialized thinkers are thoroughly orthodox in their political views, and swallow poisonous drugs with the same blind faith with which the most ignorant man among us swallows the same drugs. They accept views about health, disease and healing ready-made from the hands of interested specialists with an alarming lack of critical acumen and analytic approach. Even those relatively rare men who, experts in one field, have made a name for themselves as being willing to think in other fields, are not prone to think when any subject that is called medicine is broached.

We must be avid for orientation and abandon our stupid notion that only careful approaches to new facts are acceptable. If our native curiosity that led us, as prattling children, to be forever troubling our parents with the question, “why,” has been conditioned out of us, if we have no curiosity about what goes on around us and why it goes on as it does instead of some other way, we must re-acquire our questioning and questing attitude and begin to learn the truth for ourselves. In the field of medicine the attitude that “my physician knows” is out of date. We have watched them long enough, have noted their frequent changes of theory and their incessant changes of methods of treatment, to know that they do not know. They are groping in a darkness that is stygian.

Sociologists continue to lament the “alarming trend of the post-war period which has jeopardized the future of science and changed the lives of scientists so profoundly,” but they seem to be blind to the real causes of this conversion of scientists into lackeys of the commercial interests. Not knowing the cause, they cannot point to the remedy. In addition to this, any sociologist who should dare expose the cause and point to the remedy would quickly lose his job. Perhaps it is this job-insecurity that renders them blind. There is an amazing amount of that kind of blindness that can see and won't in our world today.

We have watched the exploitation, by the chemical industry, of the sulfonamides, the antibiotics, ACTH and other drugs and we know today that the medical profession is exploited as extensively by the chemical industry as is the general public. How little the profession knows and how much they depend upon the manufacturing drug industry to tell them how to treat their patients and with what to treat them is revealed daily before our eyes. That the physician is the prey of economic forces over which he has no control is, however, but one of his glaring faults. He is the victim of an ignorance that is lamentable and the recipient of a fabricated tradition that is comical and for which medical and academic historians are responsible.

Contemporary academic history is characterized by a medical orientation of which any true historian would be ashamed. It tends to the view that medicine and historical analysis should be kept separate. Anything and everything that is even remotely related to the care of both the well and the sick is uncritically called medicine. In this, historians apparently follow blindly the lead of medical historians, who struggle vainly to provide medicine with an ancient pedigree and with a story of continuous progress. One history will suffice to provide us with examples of this fabrication of medical “history.” World Civilization (1954), by Bums and Ralph, says that among the Sumerians “Astronomy was little more than astrology, medicine was a curious compound of herbalism and magic... The third branch of science in which the Egyptians did some remarkable work was medicine!” The Egyptians “noted the curative properties of numerous drugs.”

These historians say: “Greek medicine has its origin with the philosophers. The pioneers were Empedocles, exponent of die theory of the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), and Alcmeon, a member of the Pythagorean school. The former discovered that blood flows to and from the heart, and that the pores of the skin supplement the work of the respiratory passages in breathing. Alcmeon originated the practice of dissecting animal bodies, discovered the optic nerve and the Eustachian tubes, and learned that the brain is the center of the nervous system.” Making physicians out of these men because of their discoveries in anatomy and physiology is something like making a student of high school biology into a veterinarian because he dissects a frog.

These historians add: “More important still was the work of Hippocrates of Cos in the fifth and the fourth centuries. If this great physician had made no other contribution than the overthrow of the supernatural explanation of disease, he would still deserve to be called the father of medicine. He dinned into the ears of his pupils the doctrine that every disease has a natural cause, and without natural causes nothing happens. In addition, by his methods of careful study and comparison of symptoms he laid the foundation of clinical medicine. He discovered the phenomenon of crisis in disease and improved the practice of surgery. Though he had a wide knowledge of drugs, his chief reliances in treatment were diet and rest.” Thus are large myths built up by piling myth upon myth. I have no doubt that these two historians know well they know no more of Hippocrates than the average reader and that they are well acquainted with the fact that nothing is known of the man. He can hardly be called a historical figure. Nothing is evidence that is not known and it is not known that Hippocrates ever had a student to din anything into his ears.

This refusal of historians, both medical and academic, to separate the many elements that they have jumbled together as medicine has provided us with a confusing mishmash of myth, magic, incantations, religion, herbal practices, massage, water treatments, drugs, surgery, hygiene, etc., with no understanding of any of it. The result of jumbling together these different elements under the rubric medicine has been to confuse the students of history and to utterly mislead them. Medical historians are liars as much by omission as by exaggeration. They falsify history as much by what they accept as by what they reject. When they write popular medical histories, they glamorize the story as much as they can and hide important facts from their readers. The distortions of which they are guilty in their efforts to write, not history but propaganda, are enough to entitle them to the highest rank in the Annanias Club.

The practice of medical historians picking out some shining light, such as Harvey in the seventeenth century, and building their history around him, making a veritable hero of the man of their choice, and neglecting the actual practices of the time, lends a false glamour to medicine. It is a clever way to lie, but it is not history. Historical reality is by-passed in deference to rhapsodic apology for the sanctity of the profession. Actually, the reader is tricked, however innocently, into thinking that such a man, though often rejected by his contemporaries in the profession, is representative of the profession. Such stories are almost irrelevant because they concern only isolated fragments of the profession, those only (as a usual thing) who can be metamorphosed into medical heroes, and tell us very little about the way the profession was moving and the manner in which it was caring for its patients. The books present no army of physicians busily engaged in ministering to their patients, merely a few shots of a few outstanding men in scarcely identifiable dress. They tell us of studies in anatomy, for example, made by one man or a few, but fail to reveal the practices, not only of this one man, but of his contemporaries in the profession. They do not reveal the true state of knowledge of the profession, nor do they reveal trends. They reveal nothing that went on at the bedside. This is no way to write history, however well it may serve the needs of the biased propagandist.

By dialectics and metaphorical language almost any fact may be twisted to fit in with the general theme of medical progress, although, as I have shown in this book, no continuity of progress runs like a golden thread through the warp and woof of medical history. This is not to say that there has not been any progress in the biological sciences and in chemistry, two groups of sciences that medical men term medical sciences, but it is to deny that in the art of medicine or the science of medicine, as distinct from the biological and chemical sciences, there has been any progress. I will go further and deny that there can be progress in such a field.

When Tennyson said: “Noble the Saxon who hurl’d at this idol a vigorous weapon in olden England,” he expressed my sentiments perfectly. Idol smashers are needed in every age and the idols of medicine are long overdue for a smashing. In presenting this book to the people of this land, I hope to merit the commendation contained in the following lines of Tennyson:

When from the terrors of Nature a people have fashioned and worship a spirit of Evil,

Blest be the Voice of the Teacher who calls to them Set yourselves free!

So egregiously has the idol of medicine always been in the wrong that the worship paid to it during the past four hundred years reflects most discreditably upon the thinking of the people and involves them in the strongest condemnation. Unfortunately, medical men have succeeded in imposing a severe regimentation upon the press, rendering it complacent of their tyrannous suppression of the truth and their obstruction of all efforts towards truth and progress. It is by such nefarious means that the public have been rendered too blind to have even the desire to see. In our press, alas! anything that might harm the holy medical profession is summarily suppressed by this curious guardian of the public interest; thus the press deserves the description given of it by Tennyson:

And the press of a thousand cities is prized for it smells of the beast,

Or easily violates virgin truth, for a coin or a cheque.

He who sheds the full light of knowledge upon the darksome ways of medicine and thus frees the mind from the close-knit bonds of superstition, is certain to meet with opposition and slander from the unthinking herd. Men believe anything, no matter how absurd, if it has been sufficiently long taught or if it is sufficiently often repeated and stressed, and they do not abandon their long cherished beliefs, however fallacious, without a struggle. The struggle most often takes the form of an attack upon whoever dares to question their myths and prepossessions. Indeed, they are likely to consider any attack upon these prepossessions as direct attacks upon their persons. I do not hope to escape the slander and misrepresentation that is the lot of all those who dare to expose the age-old fallacies that we accept as fixed truths, but I do hope that many of my readers will be sufficiently intellectually curious to give the pages that follow candid thought and near impartial consideration.

Chapter 1: HIDDEN JEWELS

It was early morning on the day of Sulum (set apart) in Sumer six thousand years ago. On that day not even the king was permitted to eat cooked food, change his garments, put on new clothes, drive in a chariot or “take medicine.” Sulum was the day of rest and had been set aside by god himself as a day of rest for man. It was a beautiful morning; the sun was just coming up over the eastern horizon, the gentle southern breeze was cool and refreshing, the odor of wild flowers was wafted in from the fields that surrounded the city, the songs of many birds could be heard as they flitted from tree to tree and the hum of insects was audible on all sides. Only man was resting.

Suddenly, in violation of all the tabus, the air was rent with loud voices of the news boys: “Extra! Extra! Read all about it! History has dawned! Sumerians are now historic people!” What had happened? The sleeping citizens of Sumer awoke, rubbed their sleep-filled eyes and stirred about. They could not have known that the king, who was also the high priest and had a direct pipe-line to the throne of the most high god, had removed the tabu against work and gaiety on that special day. Only the newsman and the boys selling the special edition of the Sumer Chronicle were aware of the indulgence.

Rubbing his eyes, the head of one household slowly got out of bed, donned the G-string he wore the day before, and went out to see what all the noise was about. Reaching the front gate, he called to one of the newsboys and purchased a paper. There it was, just as the boys had said, blazoned across the front page in big letters: “History Has Dawned.” Under the big headline he read in smaller type: “We are now civilized people. No longer are we prehistoric.” He hastened back into the house, musing to himself as he went: “Last evening I went to bed prehistoric man, this morning I awaken historic man. I wonder what changes have occurred in me.”

By the time he reached the family living room the whole family had collected in excited expectancy. “What is it, Daddy?” asked his youngest daughter. “What has happened?” He read them the whole exciting story: A genius had invented a means of writing. It was now possible to record one’s thoughts and deeds. There followed a glowing account of the long, heroic struggle of the young genius who invented the alphabet. But the most exciting part of the story was the statement that prehistoric man had now become historic man. No longer was he to be thought of as a short, squat, bushy browned, prognathic semi-ape that had learned to walk upright. Hereafter he was to be known as a man; a civilized man.

Gleefully, the young folks listened to the startling news. They had not, before that moment, been aware of the changes that had taken place in them during the night while they slept, but, as they heard the heartening news that, hereafter, their descendants will have to respect them and not think of them as mere anthropoids, they were filled with much self-esteem. ,

The oldest daughter donned a scarlet G-string, the one she had worn to the party the evening before, and wildly danced a light fantastic, so elated was she that now she could attend the movies accompanied by a civilized man; no longer would she be forced to go and watch her favorite hero of the silver screen with a big hairy halfape as escort. It was, however, necessary to quiet his son, who, upon receiving the earth shaking news, said: “Dad, now that we are historic, can't we get rid of all that horde of gods and goddesses we have been supporting for the past three centuries? I want to be a Christian and have only three gods and one goddess.” Such heretical language was dangerous; some of the household gods might overhear him and become angry.

It was a great day in the life of the Sumerians. The newspaper also carried the announcement on the front page that, on that day, in honor of the great event, the gods had consented to suspend all blue laws and permit the people of Sumer to enjoy life. They danced and sang in the streets. In the evening there was music and feasting. The people of Sumer had been elevated to a high place in the world. All around them were people who still resided in the darkness of prehistory, but they had “come of age.” No longer did they face the gloomy prospect of being named after some future town near which their bones would be discovered; they were going to leave their records in a more decipherable form and not trust their place in history to a few arrowheads, a piece of broken pottery, a few grains of burnt com and a fractured femur or a broken knee cap.

The king elevated the genius who had invented the alphabet to the position of Chief Scribe of the Royal Libraries and assigned to him three beautiful young concubines and a young eunuch to take care of the less pleasant duties of the harem. The Chamber of Commerce presented him with a beautiful span of white Arabian horses and the latest model gold-trimmed chariot. The Royal College conferred upon him the honorary degree, Doctor of Literature, while half the maidens in Sumer were prostrate at his feet. A new mansion was assigned to him and he, with his entourage, moved in.

The eunuch, like a young Hebrew eunuch named Daniel, who was later to utter prophesies from the eunuch quarters built over the site where the young scribes house was now located, closed his eyes and gazed far down the corridors of time and warned the young man not to let his fame go to his head. “Your very name shall be forgotten,” he said, “and the name of your monarch shall be lost. The names of your beautiful concubines shall not be remembered and your chariot shall rot and become dust. Teach the scribes of Sumer to write upon clay tablets and to hide them in underground vaults that they may be preserved for some future archeologist to uncover and decipher, for Sumer shall perish and her very language shall be lost.

“A mightier people, the Amorites, who shall become known as the Babylonians, whom we now despise, shall overrun our country and these shall be overrun by the Assyrians. Then shall come the Persians, followed by the Greeks, then the Romans and finally, Mongol hordes shall lay waste to the very site upon which we stand. Here where is mighty Sumer, there shall be goat pastures and nomads shall pitch their tents over the buried remains of the monarch’s royal castle.

“Our mighty monarch, son of the most high god that he is, is also chief-priest, head medicine-man and our biggest real estate owner, but god has other sons who rule over other slaves, and these shall make war and destroy kingdoms. Led by the gods, these mighty conquerors shall lay waste the works of man’s hands and they shall kill and plunder as no common highwayman ever dreams of doing. Free peoples shall be carried away into slavery, brave soldiers captured in war, shall be emasculated, maidens shall be taken into concubinage and the whole earth shall be repeatedly drenched in gore.

“In the Mediterranean a country shall arise that shall be called Greece. There the shaman shall attain to great prominence and his profession shall break into pieces and become several specialties. One group of these shamans shall call themselves leeches and they shall poison the sick. ‘All the dregs and scum of the earth and sea’ will they pour down the protesting throats of their trusting patients in the name of healing, and they shall grow in numbers and in influence and they shall spread over the earth and enslave the minds of men with their false doctrines as they fill their bodies with the witch-brews.

“At another part of the Mediterranean shall arise another city. It shall be called Rome and it shall attempt to rule the whole world. There an institution shall arise that shall be called The Church and it shall claim to be a god and that it has authority to rule over the earth. The mighty military power of Rome shall wane and become as though it had not been, but the church shall keep alive the ambition of Rome to rule the world. This institution shall break into a number of fragments and its fragments shall spread over the whole earth and teach men fear, such as our Holy Monarch does not dream of teaching the people of Sumer. They shall rule the minds of men and hold them in intellectual slavery. Your alphabet shall be used, not to carry enlightenment to the people, but to confuse them and frighten them that they may be more readily exploited.

“The future owners of the collective wealth of the nations shall form themselves into a Chamber of Commerce and they shall control the legislatures of the nations and shall call themselves the ‘better class.’ The workers shall be free, by which, it shall be meant that they do not have to be paid for as slaves are paid for. Instead of the workers of that far away time receiving their pay, in keep, they shall receive their keep in pay. The workers shall be brainwashed from infancy with the stew prepared for them by the owners of the earth. They shall be taught that they are free and they shall cherish the illusion all their lives. A prophet shall arise among them who will declare: The greatest foe of the liberties of a people is their own illusion of liberty,’ but the workers shall scoff at him and give their ears to the Chamber of Commerce.

“Behold! I show you a great mystery. I see a great ocean and across its wide expanse, even on the other side of the world, 1 see a great continent filled with a great number of people and with hamlets and cities and great factories and the country is called the United States of America. Its land is filled with beautiful edifices, some of them covering more ground than all of Sumer, and these are called schools and colleges. I see little children just out of their hip-pins (the Sumerian term for diapers), trekking their way each morning to school, where they color card boards and sing songs. The teachers in these great educational institutions, as the Americans shall call their intellectual canning factories, are ‘guaranteed incapables,’ who regard themselves as glorified inf ant-tenders (the Sumerian phrase for babysitter) and the children and youths of this great nation shall not be truly educated, although its people shall be taxed into the poor house to sustain the educational system. Genuine education shall be tabu because the church, the Chamber of Commerce, the American Association of Leeches and the politicians of that time shall join together in a united front to prevent them from being taught anything unless it is first approved by the church, the leeches, the politicians, the exploiters of labor and the generals of the Army.

“The poor, benighted people of this great land, not knowing how Egyptian-like is the intellectual darkness in which they shall be kept, shall boast of their enlightenment, while deluded with the thought that they are free. They shall sing loud hosannas to the goddess of liberty, to whom they shall do lip service, while the chains of their slavery are being more tightly riveted upon them. ‘Land of the free and home of the brave,’ they shall call their country, even while it is shackled with chains of the strongest steel. They shall be brainwashed instead of educated and their freedom shall go up in smoke.”

The eunuch finished his prophesy and was sent back to his duties in the harem. Kneeling, he uttered a prayer to the Sumerian trinity, whom he knew the Sumerians would pass on to the

Babylonians as they went down before a stronger force, even as his own people had been swallowed up by the great maw of war that grows inevitably out of the systems of exploitation that struggle for control of the earth. He knew that the struggles of classes within the state are but miniature forms of the same struggles; that each class demands and strives to achieve for itself privileges and special powers over others.

In the vision he had just seen, the details of which he had communicated to the Chief Scribe of the Royal Library, he had witnessed the rise of the poisoning profession and its achievement of a monopoly of the care of the sick. He had seen its doctrines and its practices fastened upon the people by force of law and the policeman’s club and he had witnessed the legislators of the nations bow to the will of the profession of leeches. Musing to himself as he made the bed of the Scribe’s favorite concubine: “In the words of a character that shall be created by a man who shall be called the greatest of the English poets: ‘What fools these mortals be!”’

We have permitted our imagination to roam backward over the past to the dawn of history in Sumer, a great city that was destroyed by the people who came to be known as the Babylonians. History begins with the written record. There are some differences of opinion about whose written record is oldest, that of Sumer or of Egypt or even of Crete. Egyptian writing is estimated to have blossomed out at about 4,000 B.C., that of Sumer about 3,000 B.C. If we are to accept the Egyptian date, this means that written records are only about six thousand years old. When recorded history began civilization had already reached an advanced stage. This means that our immediate prehistoric ancestors were civilized men and women. In this sense they are not comparable to present-day savages, whom we are fond of regarding as living primitives.

Although we equate civilization with culture, refinement, the arts and sciences, the word literally means city-ization. It is derived from civitas-city. In the Neolithic period man lived in towns, which means that he had learned to build houses. Civilization had begun. Civilization is much older than recorded history. Can we reconstruct prehistoric man? I don't think that we need to do so. He was just like you and me. What we do want, however, is an insight into his modes of living and into his modes of caring for the sick. It is to these two subjects that I want to devote some space as an introductory part of this book.

Before going further, let us clear away some smoke and mist, that we may be better able to see our subject. Many historians and anthropologists do not like the classification of man into prehistoric and historic, but prefer to use the terms non-literate and literate. As history is but a record of man’s past, and could have been made only after he had become literate, the two classifications mean the same thing, except that the term non-literate is equally as applicable to living primitives of the present as to the prehistoric Sumerians. One historian, trying to justify the new terminology, says that “it is as absurd to assume that the activities of mankind were unimportant and nonhistorical until a few thousand years ago #s it would be to assert that an individual’s life was of no significance until the day on which he cast his vote or began to keep a diary.”

As true as his statement is, it has no relevancy here. To speak of man before the beginning of recorded history as prehistoric is not to assert that before the beginning of written records, man and his activities were unimportant. We know that prehistoric man developed the beginnings of civilization, that he evolved a number of highly complex languages; that he developed a number of the arts and rudiments of some of the sciences; that he was an inventor and a builder and, finally, that he developed writing—he made history possible. It is precisely because I think that prehistoric man is one with historic man and that what he did and how he did it is of vast importance, that I have attempted the brief inquiry that is summarized in the pages of this book. As prehistory is the father of history, so prehistoric man is the father of historic man. Only the most incorrigible brat denies the importance of his parentage.

By anthropological and archeological research it may be possible to push history a short distance back beyond the origin of written records, but when we have done this, we still have a long period prior to the furthest extent of this quasi-historic period, that even archeology cannot penetrate and in which anthropology flounders like a fish out of water, due primarily to its acceptance of the Darwinian myth. Anthropology refuses to build upon man, but builds upon a hypothetical series of pre-men, the fossils of which it cannot find. With all of the irrationality of a megalomaniac, anthropologists construct all of their interpretations of man’s past with the idea of progress uppermost in their minds. In this place, however, we are less interested in all of the problems involved in this phase of the subject than we are in the ways of life and the ways of caring for the sick that our ancestors employed.

Human existence antedates by many millennia the advent of medicine and the system of tribal magic out of which medicine eventually evolved. Man is reasonably supposed to have been on earth a long time, some estimate his time here at a million years, although recorded history is but six thousand years in scope. As medicine is less than three thousand years old, man managed to survive, multiply and spread over the face of the earth without the aid of the physician and his bag of tricks. In the time-clock of man’s existence, the medical profession has been in existence only a few seconds.

The medical assumption that existence and disease are contemporaneous poses for us the query: By what means did man secure this survival through the ages of his existence during which he was without the benefit of germs, physicians and drugs? In other words, how did our primitive ancestors prevent disease and how did they care for the sick?

It is the answer to this question that I shall attempt to find in the first section of this book. But in our effort to discover the answer we must go back to the origin of that system of primitive magic by which man, for a long period and even yet, to a considerable extent, attempted to control the forces and processes of nature and to appease the anger or incur the favor of the spirits, good and evil. For, no matter how far back into man’s past we may be able to push the system of magic, there was a long period before that time during which he existed without its doubtful aid.

It must be admitted at the outset that we possess but a limited amount of data upon which to base an answer and that the little data we do possess has been so warped and twisted by the fanciful interpretations of anthropologists, archeologists and historians that it is often non-recognizable. I believe, however, there are ways into the past that are sufficiently reliable to provide us with a reasonably correct answer to our question. In our attempt to get into man’s fabulous past we must avoid the tendency of the modem mind, nowhere more evident than in the works of anthropologists and archeologists, to generalize, often on inadequate data, more often on badly assembled and disjointed data. The matter of method is equally as important to the historian as to the scientist. Only by competent methods employed in obtaining factual data and extreme care in drawing conclusions therefrom can we determine the probability of any happening. As positivistic historians our task is to reconstruct, as true as possible, a picture of what actually occurred in the unrecorded past. In doing this, we are not to take an evolutionary⁷ position and endeavor to determine how a thing came to be, but to lay out our picture on the broad basis of the human constitutional canvas. We are going to study man, not theories about man; not theories about how man came into being and evolved. Speculations about man’s evolution may always be indulged when there is a dearth of facts and a lack of serious purpose in what we are doing. Scientists and historians, having elected to cast off Homer, Hesiod and Moses, for the low-browed, life-long dyspeptic, Darwin, cannot understand man’s past.

Several lines of investigation are open to us, each of which must be considered on a broad basis and with diligent care in our efforts to separate the real from the fanciful. Perhaps etymology can supply us with clues to the life of our prehistoric ancestors, for it was they who developed language, but there is sufficient uncertainty about the original meanings of many words and so much disagreement among etymologists that this constitutes a very shaky reed upon which to learn. I shall attempt no consideration of such evidence at this time, although no avenue into the past should be denied us, but all of them should be carefully explored. Without apologies for my departures from the usual methods of anthropologists* I shall briefly explore only the following areas of knowledge:

1. We shall consider man as a living creature with definite needs, instincts, capabilities and powers and as having met the problems of existence in manners that are faithful reflections of his inherent constitution. This means should take us back far beyond the immediate prehistoric period.

Both from a universal historical and from a biological point of view, the outstanding features of man’s life are his instincts, tendencies and inclinations; his efforts to survive and his urge to perpetuate his kind. In this sense, if in no other, he is one with the animals and we are justified in studying him as such. Such a study, if carefully made, should provide us with considerable insight into man’s way of life in the prehistoric past.

2. The second way to get into prehistory is to explore the equipment man brought along with him from his prehistoric period. The early cultures that sprang up along the rivers of Egypt and Mesopotamia inherited from the people who settled there in what may be termed the “stone age,” many of their institutions and ideas, so that the early history of these peoples is the history of primitive peoples. I shall, in this connection, consider only the equipment that relates directly to our subject.

3. We shall consider the myths and traditions of our ancestors to find, as far as possible, what truths may be contained in these. Important as is this field of our study, I shall devote little space to it.

When Heinrich Schleimann uncovered the ruins of ancient Troy he opened up a whole new field of study—not in the ruins, but in what had previously been looked upon as baseless myths of ancient peoples. Homer’s story of Troy was no longer a baseless fiction and the heroes and heroines of that struggle became real men and women. Troy was no longer an imaginary city where Achaeans fought an imaginary war, but became an historic fact and the war a grim struggle between closely related peoples. Can we doubt today that Agamemnon and Priam, Paris and Helen, Achilles and Ulysses were real people?

Subsequent diggings in Greece, Egypt, the Near East and elsewhere have shown that the ancient books of the Hebrews, Egyptians, Persians, Indians and other peoples, instead of being filled with stories that were drawn from thin air, contained garbled accounts of men, cities and struggles that were realities. (These accounts, as we have them, are probably as accurate as what we get of current events in our daily papers.) Even the Labyrinth of Greek mythology was unearthed in the ruins of Knossus on the Isle of Crete.

The study of man’s traditions and myths as well as the study of his institutions and customs at the dawn of history, provide us with an insight into his prehistory, the myths and traditions taking us far back into the past. The myths and traditions of a people contain more or less confused accounts of their past ; they are racial memories. They are like dreams, confused by a lot of irrelevant materials, but possessing a genuine content of past happenings. Intelligent study of them, involving a critical analysis of their elements and a careful separation of the probable from the improbable, even the possible from the impossible, can be made to yield much information of the past.

Homer, like the Bible, is an inexhaustible storehouse of anthropological lore. Among the oldest of Western writings and the most complete of these, his works give us glimpses of a world we have almost forgotten. Homer deals with almost every aspect of Acheaen life and displays an intimate knowledge of the ways and philosophies of his predecessors. A citizen of the Bronze Age, he has taken us back into the past as no other ancient writer has done. I see nothing marvelous, however, in the fact that he spoke Greek and cannot become ecstatic, as do some of his eulogists, over the fact that he employed Greek terms in detailing parts of the body.

Excavations in Greece, Troy, Babylon, Egypt and elsewhere and the deciphering of the inscriptions and records that have been left by the ravages of time and of man, have given us a new conception of pre-Homeric peoples. In general, they were very modem, with all the virtues and vices we so love and, if not our superiors in intellect, at least our equals. They lacked the accumulated knowledge we possess, but were otherwise as human as are we. Indeed, it is not wrong to say we have received all of our virtues and many of our vices from them and still adhere to a great body of superstitions that they bequeathed to us. The Hebrew Scriptures, though not as old as Homer, are Eastern. They are packed with a wealth of anthropological lore, reaching back, even into the stone age. There are other ancient writings, such as those of the Zen religion of India, that also reach back into the dim prehistoric era.

4. Anthropology has studied the ways of living primitives and there can be no doubt that these studies have thrown some light on our past. Here, also, I shall devote but small space to those matters that pertain to our immediate subject.

What are we to regard as primitive man? Are we to think of primitive man as man in the earliest period of human existence or are we to think of tribes now living in the modem world, that have made but scanty cultural advancement, as primitive? Are we to think of man in his original habitat or of modem uncultured tribes that are widely

dispersed over the earth, as primitive? If man was originally a tropical or sub-tropical being, can we logically think of the Eskimo and his frigid existence as primitive. If man is, in his anatomical and physiological features, a frugivore, can we logically think of his carnivorous practices as primitive?

Man seems to have originated ia the tropics or sub-tropics and, if this is true, it cannot be logically held that the means and measures he has adopted to enable him to survive in non-tropical regions of the earth, formed part of his original or pristine ways of life. We may logically assume that he started life from scratch, that he acquired his culture by a slow process, so that the savage is culturally closer to primitive man than is civilized man, but we certainly cannot logically include all of the practices found among savages, in all parts of the earth, among the primitive practices of our ancestors.

The life of the modem savage is ruled to a remarkable extent by magic and superstition. We are certainly not wrong in assuming that man started his existence on this earth without magic or superstition. However far back into man’s past it may be possible to place the origin of a particular superstition or to push his system of magic, it certainly was not primitive. He acquired his superstitions and his magical practices, as he did the other elements of his culture, slowly, piece by piece, and not all at once. Although it is customary to refer to his system of magic as “primitive magic,” this phrase is misleading. Magic could have had no place in the life of earliest man.

5. A study of the practices and traditions of man at the dawn of history must provide much insight into the ways of man in at least the immediate prehistoric period. This is really a part of our second proposition, but for our purposes, this field of inquiry may be most rewarding, hence I have separated it from the rest.

At the dawn of history prehistoric man and historic man were one and the same. Instead of wiping the slate clean and beginning all over again with a completely new set of institutions, a completely new set of ideas and practices, and a completely new mode of life, historic man merely continued on with the institutions, ideas, practices and ways of life that prehistoric man had built up. The invention of writing did not make any immediate radical change in his way of life. That what he received from prehistory was a crazy-quilt of good, bad and indifferent, of wise and foolish, of useful and non-useful is evident to any reader of early history or, for that matter, of the history of the present. Thus it is that early history is late prehistory. But one problem confronts us: namely, how far back into prehistory are we justified in projecting what we find at the dawn of history? Myth and tradition may assist us some in this, but not greatly.

The diffusion of culture from southwestern Asia to and through other parts of the world was inevitably accompanied by a lag, so that, it is possible to study the immediate beginning of history in several places, but this would take us too far into such matters for the size of this book. Archeologists and historians have provided us with a great fund of evidence of the cultural interchanges that were in constant procession between the various Middle Eastern and African cultures in the early period of history. A similar interchange between these cultures and those of Eastern and Southern Europe also occurred. Greece becomes a specially fruitful field in which to search for data needed in our inquiry.

Chapter 2: THE CRYSTAL FOUNTAIN

The highest living structure of which we have any knowledge is the organic structure of man. The human organism, segregated and individualized, is possessed of certain powers and capacities that are lacking in any of the organic forms beneath man. But, considering the materials and structures of man and animal, they are the same. They are each composed of the same chemical elements, of the same types of cells and tissues and of similar or identical organs. Their organs subserve similar or identical functions. Blood flows through the veins of the ape, as it does through those of man, and for the same purpose. Air is breathed by the lungs of the horse, as by those of man, and for the same purpose. Water is drunk by the cow, as by man, and for the same purpose. We eat and the animal world eats with us. We are active and so is the animal world. We sleep and the animal kingdom sleeps also. Man is part of nature. He is not above nature, is not separate from it, is no violation of it—he is not supernatural nor extranatural.

We may portray man in relation to his whole social setting; we may deal with him historically or contemporaneously, or we may study him as a specimen of animal life. Without wishing in any way to deprecate the value of studying him historically, socially and as a contemporary being, I propose in this chapter to deal with him as an animal, not with any intent to degrade him, but with the aim of discovering his primitive needs and behavior patterns, to the end that we may gain a more clear insight into the ways of life that may logically be expected to have been pursued by our primitive ancestors. Basic to his primitive way of life was his satisfaction (adequate satisfaction) of his animal needs. Basic to his effort to supply his needs must have been those ways of existence that conform to his constitutionally determined actions. If he could not fly as a bird, nor live under water like a fish, we must logically expect that he lived as a mammal and not merely as any mammal, but as a primate or, perhaps, more properly, as the primate.

Biologically, man is an animal with the same tissues and organs as those possessed by the same class of animals to which he belongs. Like them, he has bones, muscles, nerves, glands, a digestive system and other organs of nutrition, a heart and blood vessels, lungs, liver, kidneys and other organs; like them, he becomes hungry and thirsty, he grows tired and requires sleep; he is, like them, subject to heat and cold; like them, he has his origin, his gradual development, his maturity, his gradual decline and, finally, his death. It is as a living organism, having certain organic needs and certain organically determined modes of behavior that we must study him.

Without reducing him to the status of a mere animal, we may think of him as an organic complex, the elephant as another such complex, the worm as another and so on, and we may consider, not only the needs that are common to all of the various animate complexes we find in nature, but the specific needs of each complex, according to its own constitution. In this study we are interested primarily in man and can refer to the other animals only by way of illustration of our subject. It is important to treat the life of early man in the light of his known physiologic, biologic and sociologic character and in reference to the basic needs of the human organism as such. Archeologists, anthropologists, sociologists and historians have rarely, and then only superficially, considered man as a biologic and physiologic entity. They have been more interested in his cultural developments than in his organismal character and needs. They have considered his behavior-patterns when they have condescended to consider these at all, not in relation to his primary needs, but in relation to his social environment.

Modem man’s superiority over his primitive ancestors, like the superiority of civilized over savage man, rests in his social achievements and not in his biological equipment. Hence, man’s primary needs are not the results of his social evolution, and do not grow out of the cultural stages in which he may be found at various periods of prehistory and history and in the various regions of the earth, but out of his primitive constitution. Man has certain needs and desires which are basic to his very existence and are not merely the outgrowths of whatever condition he may find himself in at any stage of culture. When we neglect to intimately integrate man’s cultures with his animal needs and drives, we cut ourselves off from the possibility of understanding his behavior. It is for this reason that any effort to create a synthesis of the past life of man and of his multiform activities, that neglects the biologic and physiologic factors, and thinks wholly in terms of psychology, religion and culture, is inadequately based.

Fortunately we are not reduced to the necessity of formulating hypotheses in our attempt to understand the activities of prehistoric man, but can rely upon specific and concrete activities and needs, for man is a known and not an unknown entity. Regardless of the shifting views and systems and the coming and going of hypotheses, the constitutional needs of man, as an animal, are permanent. They reach as far backward into prehistory as they reach forward into the future. They were as real and as urgent in the life of the earliest man as they are in the lives of our contemporaries. The demonstrated facts of biology, physiology and psychology become premises and postulates upon which we may erect a logical structure which becomes a frame of reference for our study of the life of prehistoric man. Basically, human nature must continue much as it has always been.

We are as justified in beginning our study of prehistoric life with the fundamental facts of man’s physiologic and biologic life as is the biologist in commencing his studies of life with the elemental phenomena of living organisms. Indeed our approach to our respective subjects is identical, except that we confine our studies to one organism, whereas the biologist is interested in life as a whole. By this means we arrive at a basic principle of human life which is quite as immutable as the principles the biologist has found to relate to unicellular life. Like all central truths, its ramifications are infinite—as infinite as the appearance of variety, and as pervading as the sense of oneness in the universe.

The deterministic tendencies of constitution are as real in man as in animals below him in the scale of being, although it may be readily admitted that caprice and indeterminacy play larger roles in the domain of human activity than in those of the lower orders. It is upon the basis of the inner compulsions of the underlying constitution and its basic needs that human life moves in patterns and configurations. A recognition of this fact makes it possible for us to reconstruct the life-pattern, as distinguished from his cultural patterns, of primitive man. Life must be explained primarily from itself, not by bringing in such external and certainly secondary factors as environment and sociology, although we cannot deny the importance of these factors. Organic form, organic needs and organic forces are the central and primary factors for the student of human biology to consider. We must insist upon the validity of this emphasis upon human constitution as the central feature or pivot around which human life must always revolve.

This emphasis upon organic needs as the centrality of prehistoric man’s activities, which needs exist independently of the various cultural stages in which he may have lived, places our studies of the life of prehistoric man in the realm of causal-functional reality and abstracts it from the cultural environment with which the anthropologist has surrounded ancient man, at the same time removing it from the enveloping cloud-mist of the tentative hypotheses with which prehistoric man has been obscured. An understanding of the uniformity of relationship between the complex nature of prehistoric man and the equally complex nature of modern civilized man will enable us to understand the uniform basic needs of the two. The identity of their physiologic and biologic needs being recognized, a logical coalescence of the essential factors of their respective needs of life necessarily follows.

The modes of living are essential parts of human activity, regardless of what stage of cultural evolution we view, and are of much more importance to human existence than the many phases of culture which the historian, archeologist and anthropologist so assiduously studies. The physiologic, biologic and sociologic factors influence one another so strongly that they may be said to be interdependent and to be also functionally related, but this interdependence must not be permitted to obscure the primacy of the biologic and physiologic factors. When sociologic factors fail to square with the biologic and physiologic requirements of man, they prove to be detrimental and cannot be accepted as normal parts of man’s way of life, neither now nor in the past.

There is a basic organic continuity of man from generation to generation with a concomitant continuity of his organic requirements. In his elemental needs, he does not differ today from his remote ancestors. We are not as unlike our forefathers as we like to think. A knowledge of these elemental needs constitutes a reliable guide to an understanding of the ways of life of primitive man. It may not supply us with all of the details under all the circumstances of life in which he may have found himself, but it will certainly provide us with the broad outlines that may be filled in by greater study of man under all the circumstances under which he lives and by a careful weeding out of those forms of conduct that are based on magic or that have been imposed upon him by anti-natural forces. This work of filling in the details belongs properly to the biologist, specifically to the ecologist, and he could be trusted with it were he not blinded by doctrines of progress, expediency, medicine and capitalism.

A full understanding of man as he is today, supplies a key to understanding man as he was in the past. A full understanding of his basic needs today provides a knowledge of his basic needs in the past. As a biologic and physiologic entity, his needs then were the same as his needs today. As we ascend the hierarchic scale from plane to plane of his cultural life, the basic needs of the organism, man, remain the same, so that our “laws” remain no less binding. The causal-functional relationship of the organism, man, to his behavior is not subject to dispute; hence, despite the adaptive modifications of his behavior patterns to the different culture-patterns under which he is found, his behavior patterns remain basically the same, as his organic character and organic needs remain the same. The heterogeneous elements that enter into the formation of a culture-pattern do not so modify the constitution of the organism, man, that his basic needs are also altered in any radical manner.

The causally or functionally related forms of behavior that belong to both prehistoric and historic man are grounded in the fundamental identity of the two organic patterns. This identity of organic pattern and corresponding identity of organic needs constitutes a central principle which permeates the way of life of man in all ages of his existence. If we grant that man is biologically controlled, we cannot escape the conclusion that, basically, society is also biologically controlled. The normative conduct of man in history may be concealed under a host of cultural compulsions, as he has sought to integrate himself with the variables in the cultural patterns that have been evolved, but from the biological and physiological point of view, early man is as contemporary as modem man.

Those anthropologists who say that man is socially and not biologically controlled and that his social life is an evolution out of the “primate horde,” miss the whole essence of biological control. When, at the same time, they assert that man’s acting “is not an expression of inherent nature” but that it is an expression of social controls “rather than a direct expression of man’s primate nature,” they do not have man, but anthropoid apes in mind.

In general, what is meant by social control are those repressions, suppressions, perversions and coercions of custom, the state and religion with their force, fright, and methods of conditioning. These can never usurp the place of biological control, but by their interferences and their persistent driving of man in anti-natural directions, they can shatter the integrity of his organism, destroy the vigor of his functions, produce neuroses and psychoses, and pile up mountains of suffering and greatly shorten the human life-span. Having submitted to these for so long, man has forgotten his pristine vigor, his primal sanities, his primeval freedom and his primitive strength.

Although the foregoing may be said to be a mere demonstration of the obvious, it must be replied that this is an achievement that is much more useful than, at first thought, it may appear. For, if we know the needs of man, we may get a true graphic picture of what actually happened in the past. If we consider the needs of life, as they are seen in both man and animals, it is an easy matter to know that prehistoric man ate food, drank water, was physically active, secured rest and sleep, sought warmth and protection from the inclemencies of the weather, was injured and had his wounds to heal, became sick and recovered his health. The basic elements of bodily care (hygiene) were necessary to him as to us. Indeed, man’s basic needs were and are coeval and coextensive with his existence.

Nature’s most valuable provisions for life are the most common, though all too often least highly prized. Air is more important than gold; water more valuable than diamonds; the dirty, despised soil of our fields and forests is worth more to man than all the produce of the mines of the world. The luscious fruits that are so plentiful are of greater value than the rarest animal tidbits; water has virtues far surpassing those of the choicest wines. Sunshine far surpasses in value all the drugs of the apothecaries; while nothing, not even water, is as valuable to living existence as air. At all times within our reach, we are, indeed, bathed in it from birth to death, for in it we live and move and have our being. It is poured upon us and made to flow all around us and into us and through us. Everything else we can dispense with for minutes, for hours, even for days and weeks, but this we must have every moment or we die.

It may be of interest to the medical profession to overlook the fact that many of the factors of living upon which man depends for his continued existence are not used by mankind alone, but are integral parts of the life of the animal and plant world, yet this is a fact of the widest significance and of the utmost importance. It does not prove, however, as has been suggested, that man borrowed from the instinctive inclinations and practices of animal life, but that man has, in common with the lower animals, certain basic necessities and urges that render animate existence possible.

Without reference to its original home, a living organism has various needs, such as food, air, water, warmth, sunshine, shelter, etc. As one of these needs arises, the organism seeks its satisfaction; if is it thirsty, indicating a need for water, it drinks; if it is hungry, indicating a need for food, it seeks for and takes food; if it is tired, indicating a need for rest, it rests; if it is sleepy, indicating a need for sleep, it sleeps; if it is cold, it seeks warmth; if it is hot, it seeks the cool of the shade or a place where cool breezes blow or it seeks a damp place in which to lie or goes into the water. The dominance of any need favors the performance of certain acts rather than others. We may say, then, that the living organism acts to satisfy its needs by seeking and appropriating those substances and influences that sustain its structures and functions. Even in fleeing its enemies, it does not merely run away, but also tries to find a place of safety.

If we think of the needs of life, as these are seen in both man and animals, it will be an easy matter to know that prehistoric man ate food, drank water, was physically active, secured rest and sleep, sought warmth and protection from the inclemencies of the weather, was injured and had his wounds to heal, became sick and recovered health. The basic elements of his living were the same as the basic elements of our own way of life. His hygiene, this is to say, his care of his body and his ways of meeting its normal needs, were the same as the basic elements of our hygiene.

Knowing that in these particulars, what is true of the lower animals is true, also, of man, we are provided with a basis, in the needs of man and in his ways of satisfying these needs, for understanding the life of our primitive ancestors. We are safe in assuming that before the domestication of man by an exploiting class, if he was tired, he rested; if he was sleepy, he slept; if he was thirsty, he drank (water); if he was hungry, he ate (unprocessed food); if he was cold, he sought warmth; if he was hot, he sought the cool shade of the trees. When he was made a chattel slave, a serf, a wage slave, he was forced, like the domesticated horse, to continue working after he became tired, until his owner (the boss) gave him permission to rest. He worked in the heat, when all the rest of the animal kingdom was resting in the shade; he worked in the cold, when he needed to be sheltered from^the weather; he ate at times which his owner set aside for this function. His life was no longer his own and he was forced into a way of life that was wholly at variance with the normal ways of existence.

It is one of my purposes, in writing this book, to show that man has always relied upon supplying the basic needs of existence as the very requisite of continued life and that, at no time in his past history has he ever entirely neglected them, nor, indeed, could he have done so and survived. In prehistory he relied upon these exclusively for long ages and brought them with him into history. I shall affirm the allsufficiency of these needs, both in health and in sickness, and shall demonstrate the futility and harmfulness of trying to substitute art for the employment of the grand provisions nature has made for the support of life and the preservation and restoration of health. This is to say, I shall show that healing is a biological process, not an art, and that its success depends upon the normal things of existence and not upon adventitious and harmful substances that are often introduced into the bodies of the sick.

We may think that we have now progressed so far that we have better means of caring for the sick than had our primitive ancestors. The resolute optimism with which we accept every innovation, every complication of life, every “discovery,” appliance and contrivance that issues from the unscrupulous minds of chemists and engineers, as necessarily constituting an improvement, a “progress,” an advance in the assumed “upward march” of mankind, while the masses of the race groan under an exploitation more cruel than has ever been seen in the world before, with the oppressors of the people growing everyday more vulgar, more luxurious, more dishonest, more pleasure-loving, and more convinced that they are the chosen of the gods, attests to the depth of our degeneration. The ancient writer testified that “God hath made man upright (whole, entire, selfsufficient), but he hath sought out many inventions.” His remedial inventions are among his most deadly.

Chapter 3: LIGHT FROM EDEN

Self-preservation is said to be “natures first law.” Certainly it is only those creatures that have mastered the arts of preservation who have survived. All else have perished. The obvious necessity of all creatures of taking care of themselves was as urgent in the case of our primitive ancestors as of the animals of the fields and forests. Man, like all animals, must act in his own best interests or be exterminated in the long run. But these primitive forebears of modern man had no store of accumulated knowledge and experience to guide them in their ways of life; they lacked all results of carefully controlled and painstaking experience. They were forced to rely, as do the animals below them, upon wisdom of another and, often, more reliable sort. Knowledge of how to live is a constituent element in human nature as it is in the lower animals.

Honest instinct, it has been said, is a more reliable guide than the philosophers and scientists. All living beings possess a native wisdom driving them outside circumstances which have no pertinence to their welfare and towards situations which would benefit them and away from those which would harm them. For the most part, each selects what will nourish it, rejects that which endangers it and ignores that which is irrelevant to the growth and continuance of itself and its kind. Even the lowly ameba moves toward and engulfs a particle of food and moves away from a poison. There is a cell-wisdom in the complex organism not unlike that observed in the ameba. Deeply rooted within them and quite below the level of consciousness, the activities and modes of living of all creatures are directed by this intrinsic wisdom which is untaught by either parents or experiences, but which is exhibited in almost every act.

When a newly-hatched chick, without being taught the value of com or the danger of foxes, eats the one and runs from the other; when a group of inexperienced animals reject that which would prove harmful and eschew the irrelevant, they are exercising an intrinsic wisdom of life that far transcends our acquired knowledge. When it is said that the cow is tempted by grass and repelled by flesh and that she pays no attention to the sun, while the weed isolates oxygen and minerals and ignores almost everything else but the sun, we have stated the general fact that organisms instinctively behave in the manner for which they are constituted. This primal wisdom is not purely organismic, but exists in every organ and in every cell. It is a genetic quality that is past along from generation to generation irrespective of experience. It relates all parts of the body and causes them to function for the whole.

Man is logically assumed to have started from scratch, with no store of accumulated knowledge, no books and scientists to guide him and no previous experience to fall back upon. Heretical as the declaration may appear, it is safe to assert, on the basis of our knowledge of life, that he was guided by his own intrinsic drives, which were adequate to all of his needs. When anthropologists assert that every individual is bom with a unique biological endowment of potentialities, which are like those of other individuals, but not exactly like them, they do not confine this statement to modem man. All men, everywhere and in all ages, have been bom with biologic endowments requisite to living as men and women. We have been too much inclined to mistake the increasing complexity of our social heritage for an increasing complexity of our biologic heritage. That we custom-make our behavior-patterns to conform with the pre-arranged patterns of the society into which we are bom does not alter our basic biologic needs and capacities.

Man, like the lower animals, functioned and functions by virtue of a wisdom incarnated in his tissues. Just as the bee constructs a comb without having studied engineering, its glands secrete honey without a knowledge of chemistry; just as the mammary glands of the cow synthesize milk from elements of the blood without a knowledge of chemistry, and the human stomach digests food and the human liver secretes bile without a knowledge of physiology, so, incarnated in the very tissues of primitive man was the knowledge needed to live. Formerly, more so than now, man relied upon the guidance of inherent sanities that are now buried as vestiges within us.

The cushioned and protected embryo has no chance to exercise its organs of taste and smell, does not listen, sneeze or suck. In spite of this, the infant begins and must begin almost at once to use these organs with surety and dispatch. It blinks its eyes without prior practice and does this perfectly well in “reaction” to something approaching close. This would seem to indicate that a tendency to blink the eye lay dormant within the embryo, poised and ready, awaiting merely an appropriate occasion to move the eyelid. Certainly the capacity to behave in this manner is built into the eyelid during its embryonic evolution and it is ready for action as soon as occasion arises. We do not have to assume that tendencies to blink lay dormant in the fertilized ovum, merely that the structural potentials requisite to blinking existed there.

The newborn baby whimpers after its mother’s breast and soon learns to find it. It takes the nipple in its mouth without previous training and begins at once the sucldng movements necessary to draw the milk from the breast. This is but one of the many evidences that the living creature is fully endowed in the germ to carry on the functions of living without benefit of pedagogic warrants. I believe that we are justified in saying that an integrated organism is the incarnated expression of an ethic that is never in conflict with the highest interests of the individual. What Cannon designates the “wisdom of the body,” an ageless and illimitable wise instinct, gives rise to biologic and physiologic behavior-patterns that are basically sound. In short, the living organism obeys, fundamentally, no laws other than its own.

No matter how civilized man becomes, he never quite loses the instinctive action-patterns of his primitive ancestors. He may cultivate to a high degree the action-patterns required of him in a given culture, but underneath, ready to assert themselves at a moment’s notice, lie dormant the instinctive action-patterns of un-cultured man. It is primarily due to these inner compulsions that underlie all human action and that have not been well suppressed by civilization, that all human life moves in patterns of configuration.

We do not need to assume infallibility for the innate wisdom of the body in order to recognize its superiority over the blundering of experimental science and our clumsy efforts to interpret our varied experiences. We may recognize the general adequacy of instinct without discarding either our experience or our science. Our mistake has been that of discarding instinct and relying almost wholly upon experiences (that point in all directions at one and the same time) and science—a science that is largely a collection of “probables” and “most probables.” It is important that we re-leam that the inclinations and antipathies of instinct are the leading strings by which nature directs man and beast on the road to happiness and health.

All the warnings of instinct are entirely innate and need not the cultivation of experience. This is to say that prehistoric man functioned by dint of a wisdom incarnated in his tissues, a wisdom sufficient to maintain the homeostatic composures essential to sustain the viabilities essential to existence. This simply means that, like the animals about him, basic man was already in possession of all the answers to all the questions pertinent to prosperous existence, so that he had no need to halt his functions and take a vacation from his business of living, while attending an “institution of learning” for instructions in this basic art; nor did he require to convert himself into a primer on biology to the end that he might learn to live.

We often refer scornfully to instinct and think of it as fit only for animals, but it is a primal sanity that so far transcends the intellect that many have thought it warranted the assumption that instincts are identifiable with omniscience. If the lower orders, even the protozoa, are endowed in the germ with an intrinsic knowledge that does not depend upon a formidable brain mass for teaching them how to live (note the untutored bee building a comb), there is certainly nothing farfetched in the assumption that primeval man, before he launched himself on the course of seeking “knowledge of good and evil,” was guided primarily by his innate knowledge and not, as now, by the fool’s program of “trial and error.” The tools of science are cumbersome, slow, uncertain and, more often than otherwise, misleading. Derogate instinct as a low type of knowledge as we will, it is an obvious fact that our cultural insights and technical skills are primarily derived from instinctive activities and phenomena.

The fact of man’s survival and increase, coupled with his spread over the whole earth during the long period of prehistory, his survival under a wide variety of circumstances, many of them definitely opposed to human life, and all this without the doubtful aid of priests, physicians, psychiatrists, politicians and kings, is proof positive of the dependability of the primal sanities of homo naturalis, and it must be emphasized that these primal sanities are by no means extinct. Man continues to function basically as a whole and as an animal with certain definite needs to which he is related by means of body wisdoms of which he can never be wholly divested and remain a living being. To assume that man, in his primitive state, was not endowed, as are all lower animals, with the primary instincts essential to existence and to assume that he did not employ these as essentially adequate guides in his ways of life, is to assume that he was forced to stumble along by trial and error (the method of science) and learn, even the most essential ways of life, the hard way: experimentally. The animal may be guided by instinct in its choice of food and may instinctively reject substances that are injurious; but man, devoid of such protective instincts, would learn of the hurtful character of a poisonous plant, only by eating it and suffering.

Man must have possessed, in common with the animal kingdom, the primary instinct which causes one sex to turn to another, else would we have become extinct as a result of failure to reproduce. Probably, also, he was possessed of the primary instinct, still seen to operate in all sound people, that makes them seek their kind. The hotchpotch of races and types that we see today among civilized peoples could not have been produced without first breaking down this biological safeguard of genetic integrity.

However slow and painful may have been his progress in the arts of civilization and in his acquisition of science, starting, as he did, in all these, from scratch, he has attained his present triumphs without any fundamental altering of himself. If modem man retains few, if any, of his primal instincts in strength and purity, it were more wise to seek for the causes of the decline of his pristine biological safeguards than to deny their very existence. If he is controlled today more by conditioned reflexes than by his primal instincts, if he is adapted to an artificial environment, rather than to his primitive surroundings, if he has cultivated many ways of life that are hurtful and if, in this cultivation, he has persisted in rejecting the initial warnings of his instincts, he has not been improved by his departure from the genuinely normal ways of living, but, rather, is forced to eke out a miserable existence filled with discomforts and pains galore.

To instinct the term subjective knowledge has been applied to differentiate it from acquired knowledge, which has been called objective knowledge. Somebody has described objective knowledge as synonymous with subjective ignorance, which means, as objective knowledge increases and we rely more and more on this, our primordial sanities and composures escape us, so that there is a shift of controls of the body-total, as a balanced biologic unit, to the brain, which, so it is said, is the least competent of the somatic areas to sustain such controls. In this age of refinement and anti-naturalism, the guides of instinct are possessed, even though greatly weakened, by all.

As man progressed in the arts of civilization and grew away from the instincts, passions and propensities that characterize the lower forms of life and the lower stages of human culture, and began to develop what he regards as a higher conception of life and became more spiritual, he permitted himself to be lured away from the grand system of Hygiene that is established in nature. Although I do not intend to go into the subject at this place, I think the evidence shows that what we call civilization is the product of man’s degeneration, every advance of which has added to his degeneration. A whole man, possessed of full vigor and in possession of all his innate powers, would disdain the “aids” of our artificial life.

What we call instinct in animals appears to be a purely sensual faculty by which they distinguish between the agreeable and disagreeable, the wholesome and the unwholesome, the useful and the non-useful, the safe and the unsafe, the good and the bad—that which conduces to life and that which conduces to death. Animals, like man, contact the outside world through their senses; sensual perception alone is provided them. They have no knowledge of chemistry and toxicology, but they instinctively avoid poisonous substances; they know nothing of death, but they avoid the onrushing car. If primitive man’s stomach knew how to digest food and did not have to rely upon a textbook of physiology, his sense of taste and smell were equally competent to select his food without reliance upon such textbooks. He knew, instinctively, when to eat and when to cease eating as certainly as his liver knew how to secrete bile. Instead of living being an art th^vat the human animal requires to learn, it is an instinctive way of life to which he must return.

He has abandoned the wisdom with which his tissues were incarnated and has learned increasingly to rely upon the experts and their experimental findings, and these have deceived him.

Nearly two thousand years ago Lucretius wrote:

This too thou well mayst note; that liquid draughts of honey and of milk stray o’er the tongue With pleasing taste, whereas, contrariwise,

The bitter gall of wormwood and the juice Of wild centaury twist the mouth awry With noisome savor .. .

The wholesome things of earth titillate the senses and hurt them not, while that which is harsh and hurtful does not soothe and please the senses of man. As Lucretius said: “Lees of wine and pungent taste of endive, like the burning fires and chilling frost stab our senses, thus providing proof of their unfitness to enter the sacred realms of life.” When to the nose and ear, the eyes and taste of mouth a thing proves loathsome, we are foolish to ignore the protest of these primal senses and take such substances into our bodies.

We observe living organisms cast out onto the ground all things alien to their nature, both of seen and unseen substances, often by processes that are painful and exhausting. Whatever substance can never become a normal part of its fluids and tissues must be cast out. Accordingly we discover that there is in every creature, man included, a normal disrelish and disgust for substances that cannot be assimilated, when these are brought into contact with the senses of taste and smell. When, by some artful ruse, they are permitted to pass the body’s senses and get within, they will occasion pain in proportion to their unfitness for assimilation.

The fact that we can cultivate a relish for the most nauseous, disgusting and horrible substances, that are as disagreeable as they are unfit for entrance into the body, indicates the degree to which our senses are susceptible of perversion. That we may be induced to disregard the protests of instinct and take such substances into our body on the supposition that they will restore health, reveals the extent to which we are subject to psychological pressures and to delusions of all kinds. So strong is the protest of man’s normal instincts against the introduction of obnoxious substances into the body (witness the struggle of the baby to avoid taking a drug into its mouth: see the nurse hold its nose to force it to open its mouth to breathe so that she can forcibly introduce the drug) that some powerful psychological influence had to be provided to beat down this instinctive rejection of poisons. This was originally provided, as we shall later see, by the shaman and his magic.

But other methods of slipping poisons by the faithful sentinels that guard the entrances to the citadel of life, were not long in finding their way into use—that of disguising them: “when disguised by the sweetness of honey, poisons do into the body steal,” they pass nature’s first line of defense. If the shaman did not resort to this deception, his successor, the leech, did. They soon learned to hide their bitter, noisome drugs in the honey’s sweet that the faithful sentinels that guard the entrance to the vital domain may be deceived and let them pass.

Lucretius reveals to us that the practice was in vogue in his day. He says in his work, On the Nature of Things:

For even as healers, when they would essay To give to ailing children bitter draughts Of noisome wormwod, first will overlay The cup's rim round with the sweet golden dew Of honey, that thereby the trustful age Of childish innocence may be beguiled To ope the portal of its lips, and all Unwitting swallow down the nauseous draught Of wormwood, and thus deceived . ..

That Lucretius, in spite of his skepticism, (he seems to have been confined in his skepticism to the gods and goddesses of antiquity), was not aware of the evils that flow from such deception of the normal instincts of life, is revealed by the rest of his statement:

.. . though not betrayed,

But rather by such means may be restored And once again made strong .. .

Of all the classes of substances that occasion disease in the human system, those substances that are commonly classed as medicines are by far the most deleterious. That they are absolutely indigestible and unassimilable and are non-usable, and therefore poisonous, is not to be denied. Every sensation and every fiber of the healthy human system loathes and abominates drugs, as these occasion irritation and destruction of living structure. Perhaps no other thing has cost mankind more pain, misery and real suffering than the idea that he should poison himself because he is sick. Even the most perverted sense of taste utterly abhors drug medicines, a fact that should reveal their entire unfitness for entrance into the body. Even those who have so far perverted their senses that they are able to relish half-putrid flesh, hot, pungent spices, drink alcoholic beverages, chew or smoke tobacco, take coffee and tea, fail to find the taste of drugs pleasant.

To the normal senses of taste and smell the odor and flavor of all poisons are disgusting and painful. The pain and disgust occasioned by the taste and smell of poisons are warning signals that should cause us to refrain from taking them into our body. It is only under the sway of an anti-natural system of medicine that man consents to disregard the warning voice of his instincts and takes these foes of life into his body. Travelers tell us that savages invariably spit out the first drink of anything intoxicating, when this is given them. Such substances are also obnoxious to the sense of taste of civilized man. But if we continue to take them in spite of the protest of instinct, the intoxication

soon overcomes the instinct, so that all savages, after a time of association with civilized man, learn to drink and to take other of his popular poisons.

Under the sway of the doctrine of total depravity we have been taught to distrust our normal instincts and even to run counter to them. “Whatever is natural is wrong,” was the shibboleth of the medieval bigots, who, as Herbert Spencer expresses it, “inculcated the belief in a universe so diabolically arranged that all its pleasures are injurious and all its salutary things are disagreeable.” In defense of this creed_A the anti-naturalist says: “Has not the seductive taste of intoxicating beverages caused horrid evils? And, is it not equally certain that bitter medicine and hard labor are the sources of health and wealth. Should we not suppress the promptings of our unregenerate instincts?”

How false this creed is may be seen from the facts that intoxicating beverages have no seductive taste, that bitter medicines provide no health and hard work is seen only among the poverty stricken. In reply to his stupidity of the anti-naturalists, Dr. Oswald says: “our natural instincts not only never encourage, but strenuously resist the incipience of every stimulant-vice. An unseduced child shrinks with horror from the taste of alcoholic beverages and the fumes of burning opium. The first cigar demonstrates the virulence of nicotine by vertigo and sick headaches. Nausea accords her protest in the most unspeakable terms, and only the repeated and continued disregard of that protest at last begets the abnormal craving of that poison thirst which pious blasphemers ascribe to the promptings of our natural appetites. They might as well make us believe in the natural passion for prison life, because the victims of the Holy Inquisition became so used to their subterranean dungeons that they finally dreaded sunlight and refused to accept the offer of freedom.

“The unimpeachable testimony of instinct also clinches the physiological arguments against such doubtful delicacies as strong cheese, pickles and all sorts of spices. Children would as soon share the repast of a turkey-buzzard as the lunch of a gourmand who washes down a plate full of Limburger with a mug of ale—not to mention the haute-gout steaks and absinthe of French epicures. In the Faroe Islands famine has developed an unnatural passion for putrid fish, but the youngsters of those islands are not apt to covet the tidbits of their elders so long as they can find a crust of barley-bread, and the company cook of Fort Concho, Texas, came near getting his throat cut offering a Commanche chieftain a dish of vinegar-pickles.”

Not in a state of health alone do animals and man behave alike, but in sickness also. Sick animals seek rest and seclusion and ^ abstain from food, sometimes even from water, facts which reveal that man has no monopoly on the factors of hygiene in the care of the sick. Hygiene belongs not to man alone, but to the whole organic world. Its

practical application must vary with the varying needs of the many forms of plant and animal life, but there is no form of life, from ameba to man, that does not require to meet its elemental needs in a manner conforming to its constitutional character.

Hygiene belongs to life—to all life. From the beginning has hygiene existed; from the beginning has hygiene been supreme. The well-springs of hygiene gush forth from the bed-rock of organic principles that are as eternal as the law of gravity. For this reason, greater discrimination is essential in our estimation of the presence and force of the various biological factors contained in systems of care that are offered for our consideration and acceptance or rejection.

Chapter 4: EDEN REVISITED

Man is part of a rich and multicolored world of substantial and active beings, each with a nature and freedom of its own, yet each bound to the earth by the same ties. All life forms obey the same laws of life and meet the same basic needs of existence by ways that conform to their structural adaptations. Primitive man’s initial activities must have been rigidly confined to those spheres to which his constitution adapted him. If the toad must hop and the bird must fly, man was forced by the very limitations of his make-up to adopt a way of life that these made possible. On this basis we are justified in assuming that the pristine mode of life of man followed very closely certain well-known patterns. Primitive life, unlike the fragmented life of civilized man, was certain to have been integrated into a consistent whole. Primitive man lived his life as a unit.

Nature provides for man’s body by making his wants few and easy of satisfaction. The earth, the sky and the sea are his assistants. The air, light, heat and water are agents that assist her in providing for man. Her productions for man’s body are abundant did man not neglect and destroy them. Man has been provided with the means and the stamina to live to a good old age, until he sees his children’s children playing at his feet. Lucretius has well expressed the thought that nature’s provisions are ample in the following lines:

Our kindly mother, when she hath conceived The drops of watery moisture, big with life,

Doth bring to birth the smiling crops, and trees That glad man’s hearts, and race of mortal men;

And every kind of beast she bringeth forth And giveth to each his meat, whereon they feed,

Drawing therefrom a pleasant sustenance And breed their offspring ...

All of this is not to say that there were never droughts and famines, that there were never blizzards and floods, that there were never times when it was hot and humid, but it is to assert that as a general thing, primitive man had the means of life close at hand at all times. Fortunately, also, he was not rooted in the earth, but could move from place to place, so that he could move from places of scarcity to places of abundance. He could seek warmth or the shade, could hide from the storm or flee from the flood. Considering him as a living being meeting the exigencies of his environment as such a being, he instinctively followed certain well-known ways of life.

Prof. W. C. Allee says in his scholarly work on The Social Life of Animals that the growing weight of evidence “indicates that animals are rarely solitary; That they are almost necessarily members of loosely integrated racial and interracial communities, in part woven together by environmental factors and in part by mutual attraction between members of the different communities, no one of which can be affected without changing some or even all of the rest, at least to some slight extent. Contagious distribution is the rule in nature.” Any picture of primitive man as an isolationist, living alone, and any thought that “every man’s hand was against his neighbor” is based on lamentable ignorance of nature. Man is, no doubt, a social and not merely a gregarious animal.

All the evidence we have of our earliest historic period reveals that, simple and often rough as the lives of our ancestors may have been, they were all still possessed of the instincts of humanism. Our ancestors, call them Pagans if you will, understood that nature had implanted in the human constitution mercy and reason as her allies. As Seneca expresses it: “We are members of a great body. Nature planted in us mutual love, and fitted us for social life. We must consider that we are bom for the good of the whole.” Jesus expressed this more succinctly when he said: “No man liveth unto himself.” The doctrine of “rugged individualism” is a modem political idea and came into existence in an effort to preserve the existing system of human exploitation. It adds nothing to the sweetness of life nor to the stature of man.

All the higher animals care for and protect their young. This parental care of the young is especially marked in the primates, animals next to man in structural and functional constitution. We cannot conceive of the human race having survived through the many millennia that it has existed on the earth, without even greater parental care of the young than that seen in the highest primates, as the human young actually require more such care. The human infant required love and care in the distant past as now; and we may not unreasonably think that primitive man cared for his young as tenderly and loyally as do the higher animals of the present, if not more so.

Finely organized animals need more care than others and this is particularly true of their young. The human infant, requiring more and longer care than any other animal in nature, could not have grown to maturity had primitive man not devoted himself or herself to the care and protection of his or her offspring. Experiments by psychologists have revealed that not only human young, but the young of many other species, languish and die without love and tender care. Karl Marx has left us the observation that in England, during strikes, when working mothers gave more attention to their babies, which they necessarily neglected while working in the mills and mines, the babies blossomed out like roses in their mother’s arms. Someday our bat-blind and acquisitive society is going to learn this simple truth and take its women out of the industrial tread-mills. Women are going to be deemancipated, that is, they are going to be freed from the merciless industrial exploitation that they have mistaken for emancipation.

There is a great body of anthropologists today who hold that human beings are bom with their needs oriented in the direction of love and they point out that in most human societies, if not in all, the trend has been towards cooperation rather than towards competition. My own opinion is that cooperation has been the norm of human life from man’s beginning. We are social beings, needing each other. It is literally true that “no man liveth unto himself.” All the evidence we have points to the conclusion that early man was as much of a social animal as any of the social animals below him. Man’s social life must be explained by itself and not by bringing in such external factors as environment and psychology.

Even those anthropologists who regard man as little more than an ape that has learned to walk on his hind legs, are agreed that primitive human society was one of sharing in sharp contrast to the animal horde, where competition in food getting is dominant. But even among animals, there are many that work cooperatively and sharing is more common than is generally supposed. An example comes ready to hand in the bees, where honey is socially produced and shared by all. A similar cooperative producing and equality of sharing is seen among ants. Sharing between the sexes is even more common and the sharing by parents with offspring is practically universal among the higher animals.

It is said that popularly, cruel belligerence is considered the epitome of human nature. This has never been true of man in any age and in any stage of culture. The paradox of man is that this belligerence reaches its zenith in that socio-economic state that is farthest removed from man’s pristine state. Civilized man is the cruel butcher of his species. It has been said of the Bushmen that “it is not in their nature to fight.” This non-belligerence is more in keeping with the constitution of man; his modem blood-thirstiness is the outgrowth of social conditions that turn him into a black leopard.

Primitively the family economy represents a pooling of goods and services. But mutual aid extended beyond the family. Planters and hunters shared their crops and their game with the rest of the group. Indeed, private ownership of land was not a primitive institution and the people worked the land cooperatively. The produce belonged to the group. This was primitive socialism, such as the early Christians tried to re-establish.

In primitive societies, food, the basic need of everyone, must always be made available to everyone. The scarcer food became the more reason there was for sharing what was on hand. Unlike the civilized man, who thinks of things in terms of “mine,” the primitive man thought of things in terms of the group.

Primitive man lived in the open, where the air was fresh and pure. The air was not contaminated by the exhaust from automobiles, by the effluvium from stockyards, the fumes from tan-yards and glue-factories and the chemical emanations from laboratories, chemical industries, rubber factories, etc. He did not live in unventilated homes and work in offices, workshops and factories that were laden with foul air.

Before he learned to make clothes, man went about naked in the air and sunshine, thus he had no need for sunbathes as he was enmeshed in the lustral rays of the sun much of each day. After he began to clothe himself (it is argued that he first adorned his body rather than clothed it) his clothing covered only certain regions of his body, so that much of it was exposed to sun and air all of the time. His needs for fresh air and sunshine were supplied without effort or conscious attention to their supply. They were integral parts of his normal existence, their supply being automatic.

The beautiful garden in which Adam and Eve first tasted the exquisite thrills of living was bounded by rivers and watered by mists. Man has not only worshipped the sun as the giver of life, but he has worshipped the rivers also, as the sustainer. Water as drink was and is as important among the needs of life as air and food. Dehydrated protoplasm is as lifeless as the dust under our feet. Man drank water when he was thirsty. Only at a much later date in his period of sojourn on the earth did he learn to substitute other and less valuable or even harmful fluids for the elixir of life that water is.

As earliest man had not learned to produce fermented liquors nor to brew foul decoctions from poisonous substances, such as tea and coffee, and as he did not have soft-drink factories turning out poisonous slops with which to refresh himself, we may be certain that his only drink was water—water is really his only drink, even now, all other liquids being either food or poison. Like the animals, he probably sought the purest and coolest water he could find. The myth that mineral waters and water that is foul of taste that the cows won't drink it, possess medicinal virtues came into existence after man had been on the earth a long time. Many animals and birds drink water where there is an audible ripple in the current; the cow prefers a brook to a pond and a running spring to a sluggish creek. Purer and cooler water is secured in this manner.

Man has not been equipped by nature with weapons of offense, he lacks, even, weapons of defense. He lacks claws, spurs, tusks, horns, stingers, electrical shocking organs and other weapons of defense and offense. He is lacking both in stamina and fleetness, his special senses are not as keen as those of many of the lower animals. Logically we would expect such a being pdrmally, at least, to be a peaceful and peace-loving animal. Fighting, preying, rending, tearing, killing, drinking gore and eating flesh—these would seem to be activities foreign to his constitution.

His structure and physiology ally⁹him with the higher anthropoids, which are all known to be frugivorous in their dietary practices. Inasfar as man’s structural adaptations and functional capacities differ from those of the higher anthropoids, these animals stand between man and the lower mammals. As man is not equipped with a snout, like the hog, to enable him to root in the earth for food, he is logically thought to have confined his eating, in the beginning, at least, to food substances that grew above the ground. We logically suppose man’s original diet to have been a primate diet and that he has deviated from this during the course of the ages for a variety of reasons. With all of his deviations, he has undergone no modifications of structure and function that make him any the less constitutionally a frugivore.

If man attempted to eat flesh before he had learned to make and use artificial weapons, he must have been confined to insects and small animals, like rodents and lizards, that he could catch with his hands; else, like the hyena, he followed behind the true carnivores and ate what they left after they had devoured a kill. H. G. Wells suggests that primitive man killed aged animals and ate rotting carcasses, but Wells accepts the carnivorous tradition that the expediency-serving biologists and anthropologists have built up for us. Man may have used traps and poisons in advance of his use of weapons in securing animals for food. He is certain to have found means of poisoning larger and dangerous game—deadly and tasteless poisons are widely employed by living primitives in their hunting operations.

That man did ultimately learn to eat flesh and that he actually deteriorated into the universal scavenger admits of no doubt. There are some things that the normally carnivorous animals reject as food, but there seems to be nothing that man in his present state will not eat; from rotting (ripened) poultry, through insects, snakes, snails, pickled bees, skunks, bears feet, bird’s nests, excrement and filth of various kinds, as well as clay, man eats anything that a termite will sample. It is not conceivable that this was his dietary practice from the outset. We may be sure that he had no means of pickling bees; it is hardly conceivable that he ate the excrement of animals and such things as snails, earth worms, beetles, bird’s nests, other men and women, and many other articles of food that men in various parts of the earth are now observed to eat. Indeed, it seems to me that the very fact that the eating of such substances is confined to relatively small local areas and that they are not widespread practices, indicates very strongly that they were never general practices of the race.

That man in his spread over the earth has acquired and cultivated many dietary practices that did not belong to his pristine way of life and do not fit into the constitutionally circumscribed ways of life that we should expect him to follow, seems certain. Perhaps much of this has been made necessary by the exigencies of circumstances; his very survival under the many adverse conditions to which he has been subjected has often necessitated these departures from the primate diet. Many of his perverted practices are certainly outgrowths of the system of magic. If I read the evidence correctly cannibalism, which has never been universal and has always been practiced, where practiced, only at intervals and for special purposes, was almost always of magical origin.

We may be certain that before the domestication of milk animals, primitive women were compelled to nurse their offspring. It is hardly probable that they learned to depend upon the cow, goat, ass, camel, deer and other milk animal immediately upon the domestication of these animals. They did not feed animal milk to their young. Primitive mothers disdained calling in the assistance of the animal world in feeding their babies and children. Egyptian evidence reveals that the ancient Egyptian mother, like the mothers of many existing savage tribes, nursed their offspring for three years or more. This is most likely to have been the practice of primitive mothers.

Modem civilized man or should I say woman, particularly in the West, has become so dependent upon the cow and goat for nutriment for human young and civilized women have become such poor organisms, so far as reproduction and lactation are concerned, that it is difficult for us to conceive of our ancestors getting along without the “aid’⁵ of a huge dairy industry, although we know, historically, that the dairy industry is the product of the past two centuries. Had primitive women been such poor mothers, modern man would never have come into existence. '

We are certain that before man learned to make and use fire he ate his foods uncooked. Prior to the discovery of fire, those portions of the race that ate flesh, ate it uncooked, as do many so-called primitives today. A Sumerian hymn states that the Amorite nomads of the Western hills ate uncooked flesh and did not live in houses. This was in the third millennium B.C. As cooking destroys many of the vitamins, alters some of the mineral salts, de-aminizes certain of the amino acids, changes the fats into free fatty acids that are poisonous, and otherwise destroys food values, our primitive ancestors were better nourished than are we.

Man’s myths and traditions point backward to a time when he ate principally of the fruits of the trees and the produce of the garden. Certainly, on the basis of his structure and function, this is what we should expect the primitive diet of man to have been. He ate fruit before he became a hunter; he cultivated the soil before he learned to slay, kill and eat the blood and flesh of animals. Our biologists and anthropologists have turned man upside down. By hypothesis they derive him from a primitive ancestor but make him into the most carnivorous of beasts.

For the most part primitive mandate his foods fresh as he pulled them from the trees or took them out of the ground or killed a food animal. They were eaten whole, not processed and refined, hence he received all the nutritive elements these contained. His foods were not adulterated, chemically preserved and conditioned, and they were not sprayed with a variety of poisonous insecticides. They were not artificially colored and flavored and were not tampered with by the food manufacturers. In other words, all of the food evils that are now slowly killing modem man were unknown to primitive man. Even salt, the first additive that man employed, was not used by primeval man.

Hunger should be a reliable guide for man, as for the lower animals, as to when to take food. Taste should guide him in the selection of food and rejection of poison, as it does the animals below him. Animals are also guided in these matters by the sense of smell, which should also assist man in selecting the materials he takes into his stomach. Man’s own animal senses and animal instincts are his normal guides in living and it is only because he has blunted, perverted and suppressed these and forgotten how to interpret their language that they are^no longer the reliable guides they must have been in our primitive ancestors.

Severely wounded and acutely ill animals instinctively fast. The wounded elephant does not fast because of any knowledge of anatomy and physiology, because instinct impels him to do so. Acutely ill humans also fast instinctively, if left alone and are not urged to eat in spite of an obvious dislike for or repugnance to food. Prehistoric man was not troubled with any theories about eating to keep up strength and to build “resistance.” He may be reasonably assumed to have been guided by his instincts as truly as are the lower animals, without the interference of scientific theories and without interference of physicians and family. It is reasonable to think that prehistoric man fasted when actually ill. It is equally reasonable to think that, when he was but slightly ill, and there was a limited desire to eat and a limited digestive capacity, he ate but small amounts of food. Because the fasting practices of mankind later became mixed and mingled with his magic and religious practices and were often indulged in as a means of penance, they are not to be condemned as some have done.

The inner resources of living organisms help them over many difficulties and through many trying times. It was the view of Dr. Oswald that “most wild beasts have a little of that talent of hibernation which helps squirrels and badgers over the worst hours of the long bionir-nott—the ‘bear’s night’—as the old Germans called the winter season. During the heavy ‘norther’ buffaloes often stand in the hollows of the Texas cross-timber for days together in a semi-torpid state, and the little musk-ox probably draws considerably upon inner resources to survive the terrible snows of the Hudson’s bay territory,” —Zoological Sketches, P. 65 (1883).

If an animal can go without food, as in hibernation, when cut off from food, when there is a lack of food, when actually ill and severely wounded, or during the breeding season, it is because it possesses within itself a store of food that is adequate to sustain its essential activities for a prolonged period. Exhaustive studies of these periods of abstinence have demonstrated conclusively that the animal is not harmed by the abstinence until after its inner resources are exhausted. Death must come, ultimately, if this period without food is too prolonged, but so long as the inner stores are adequate to meet its essential needs, no harm can come to its functioning or vital tissues.

The sick organism, being unable to digest food, the severely wounded organism, being equally unable to digest food, makes use of its inner stores to tide it over the period of illness or the period of repair that heals the wound. Thus it is that we see sick and wounded animals instinctively fasting and note that there is the same repugnance to food in sick and severely wounded human beings. Man, like the lower animals, carries a store of reserve food to tide him over prolonged periods when food is not available or cannot be taken. Shipwrecked sailors and entombed miners may go for days without food and survive unharmed. Volunteer fasts, ranging from a few days to over a hundred days, are numerous and benefit rather than harm has come from these periods of abstinence.

If the primal instincts of early man were as reliable as those of the lower animals, and we have no reason to think they were not, he doubtless sought out a shady, even a darkened and quiet place for rest when acutely ill, just as, today, we observe sick animals doing.

Primitive man’s life must have been one of great physical activity and it is probable that, like that of the animals, it provided all of the physical exercise for all parts of his body that was required. Formal gymnastics and grunting with weights came after man had largely abandoned his normal ways of life and had adopted sedentary and lopsided ways of living. Anthropologists and archeologists say that sedentary occupations are traceable back to the Neolithic age. The number of individuals engaged in sedentary occupations at that time must have been relatively small. While the necessities of existence must have compelled primitive man to be active, we may well doubt that he worked the long hours at grinding toil that has cursed the working classes in civilized life for nearly six thousand years. The South American Indian who exclaimed: “Ugh! Civilized man work life out trying to keep life in,” well expressed the contempt wild man has for the life of domesticated man.

Thousands of years before man organized games for exercise, animals engaged in markedly formalized play. We are not assuming too much when we assume that many games were indulged in by prehistoric man. He may have indulged in these for the sheer joy of action, but they constituted, nonetheless, forms of exercise that helped to provide him with development, suppleness and stamina.

The children of primitive man must have played as vigorously as the most energetic children of the present, much of their play being of a character that we try to imitate in our gymnastic exercises and in our games. Walking, running, jumping, climbing, wrestling, lifting and other activities must have been regular parts of the life of primitive man. Nature was his gymnasium, life his physical director. Does the mighty elephant, the lion, powerful “king of beasts,” the huge bison or the bull gorilla spend hours in a gymnasium taking formal exercise in order to attain his might? The gymnasium is not a necessity of life when life itself provides adequate and all-round exercise.

If we can judge by his bones, primitive man was a powerful animal, perhaps the equal or the superior of our mightiest specimens. As muscle size is normally correlated with bone size, the large bones of our primitive forebears may indicate a strength of which we do not even dream. It is thought that primitive man had to match wits and strength with the saber-toothed tiger. Certainly with the wilds filled with powerful beasts and, with little or no weapons with which to defend himself, primitive man had to possess a degree of strength and stamina that we seldom see today. He had to be alert and strong and fearless, else would he have been destroyed. Can there be truth in the early traditions of men who slew lions with their bare hands? Were Nimrod and Samson, David and Ajax, Hercules and Milo and other mighty men of early renown but specimens of the great strength that our primitive ancestors possessed? He was no cringing coward who conquered the first stallion; he was no weakling who domesticated the first bull. Those ancestors of ours who not only met and defeated the huge beasts of the wilds, but brought even mighty elephant under their sway, were men of strength and courage and resourcefiilness.

If we can see in the myths and traditions of mankind, not the wild and fantastic notions that the “superior” modem mind thinks they represent, but accounts of actual occurrences, slightly colored and magnified, it may be, by repeated reiteration, but essentially true, and having their basis in feats and experiences of some great ancestor who left an indelible mark upon the minds of his contemporaries and successors, perhaps we can gain some understanding of the remarkable powers of strength or speed, of accuracy of aim or of inventiveness of some of the outstanding geniuses among our prehistoric forebears.

Rest and sleep are essential elements of living in all stages of human culture. We may be sure that, without the taskmaster standing over him and driving him to added effort, primitive man rested when he was tired and slept when he was sleepy. Without artificial light to turn his nights into day, without night clubs and other nocturnal diversions to distract his attention from the serious business of living, primitive man, like the animal kingdom and modem savages, must have retired shortly after sundown and arose early in the morning. If early to bed and early to rise did not make him wealthy and wise, it must have at least aided in keeping him healthy. His hours of sleep were regulated more by his activities and by the seasons than by the artificial demands of civilization and it is impossible to think of him as “needing” sleeping potions. A normal way of life assures normal sleep.

The lower animals and so-called savages remain in the sun in the morning and come out again in the late afternoon, but they retire to the cool of the shade during the hot portion of the day, during which period they enjoy rest and sleep. It is highly probable that primitive man carried out this same instinctive practice and the practice of sleeping at noon day, seen among many peoples of the present, is but a survival of this pristine practice.

On page 65 of his Zoological Sketches Dr. Oswald says that: “In the instinct of finding shelter-places from the cold, Mammals are far superior to the birds, probably because they cannot emigrate so easily.” Shelter from heat and cold, from rain and snow, from storm and hail, is among the requirements of survival that man, as well as the lower animals, had to find or improvise. Although he has often shown a remarkable lack of intelligence in building his abodes under the brow of volcanoes or in the lowlands near the river, where floods carry him and his houses down stream, man has proved more versatile in devising shelter from the inclemencies of the weather than any of the animals of the earth.

Before he acquired the practice of building homes of mud, stone, wood, etc., that excluded the air, and before he began to crowd into great cities with their inevitable pollution of the air, it may be taken as a matter of course that primitive man spent his life, as do the animals of field and forest, in fresh air both day and night. The exceptions are those relatively small portions of the race that resided in caves. It may be assumed that during the winter and at night time, the cave dwellers were in poorly ventilated caves. Only after man began to manufacture goods and to pollute the air of his cities with the fumes of the tan-yards, perfumeries, distilleries, wineries and foundries, and to live in houses built of solid structures that excluded the air, did he live in polluted air. Even these features of late primitive life were confined to small segments of the race, as most men continued to live in the country. When man learned to keep animals and had vast herds of these, with which he lived in intimate contact, he experienced a small sample of what the denizens of Chicago’s stockyard district contend with all the year 'round.

Life would be a curse to the denizens of our large cities if nature had not blunted their senses of smell and hearing. The effluvium of the stockyards would empty ChicagS of a large portion of its population if the sense of smell of those who inhabit the region near the yards were as acute as that of the Native Americans. The wind in the right direction, the deer senses the approach of man or wolf at a great distance and acts upon the warnings of instinct to save its life. To an animal, like the dog, that can distinguish the “cold trail” of a rabbit, even from a distance, odors which offend our blunt olfactory must be unbearably irritating. It may not be true that the olfactory sense of man was ever as keen as that of the dog, but it is impossible to conceive of our out-door living ancestors being comfortable in the foul odors of a tan-yard or amid the compost of a cow-lot. Man must have inured himself to these evils slowly and lost the keenness of his primitive senses only gradually.

The jungles are often noisy and man in the jungle becomes indurated to the noise. It is doubtful if the jungle is ever as noisy as the large city, with its roar of traffic, its honking of automobile horns, its screeching of brakes, blowing of whistles, cries of peddlers and thundering of elevated trains. Living next door to the elevated line, the citizens of New York or Chicago become inured to the noise and manage to sleep despite the frequent passing of the elevated trains. Workers of mills and factories become deadened to the noise and the roar of machinery, otherwise would such work be unbearable. But we are weakened by this blunting of our natural senses and are injured by the suppression of our instincts. When we repress the urge to flee from the noise and the stench of the cities, we serve the exploitative forces of our civilization, but not our own welfare.

Man was not primitively nomadic. The arboreal or the agricultural society is essentially a rooted society, its life being related to the organic cycle of nature. On the other hand, it would be difficult to think of a more rootless society than that of the nomad until after he had domesticated animals. Domestication of the ass gave rise to the ass-nomad; domestication of the camel gave rise to the camel-nomad. The nomad and his animals moved from a place or a district which they had befouled to a clean place in search of water and pasturage. There are numerous references to the contamination of the land in the Old Testament, but these seem not to be understood by present-day students of ancient literature. A stationary people, with herds and flocks, are forced to remain amidst this befoulment, a fact that renders their abode highly insanitary. An agricultural and arboreal culture, though stationary, would not befoul the land.

The architecture of birds in building nests has been a wonder to man ever since he began to observe and think of the ingenuity of these feathered friends in providing homes for their young. We designate their building work as an instinctive skill. Instinctively the beaver builds a dam and builds his own home in the water thus provided. Dens, burrows and shelters of various kinds are built by other animals, often lining them with grass, hair, fur, leaves, feathers, etc. Certain of the apes are said to build rude shelters. The ingenuity of certain wasps in building their homes of mud is a constant source of wonder. Must we continue to think of the greatest builder of them all— man—as having begun his building on any other than and instinctive basis? The men who built the first pyramids in Egypt and the hanging gardens in Babylon were but the great grandchildren of men who made arrow tips of stone and polished stone instruments to serve as tools. Is it too much to think that primitive man may have instinctively built shelters for himself and his family? Are his present complex and massive structures but intellectual extensions of his prior instinctive practices? Are not his building skills based solidly upon instinctive techniques as marvelous as those displayed by birds and beavers?

It is true that there are tribes of men who built not at all or built but little and that crudely. We also find birds, certain varieties of which have ceased to build nests or which build crude and apparently inadequate nests. They seem to have lost the building instinct. Have some tribes of men also lost this instinct? It is also true that we employ tools in our building operations and we employ tools in making our tools, but it is equally true that no tools were used in making our first tools. It is just probable that no tools were employed in making our first homes. I do not think that we can believe that man first lived in caves and, then, after the population outgrew the supply of caves or we had migrated to regions where caves were scarce or absent, he learned to construct artificial caves in which to live. As a nude animal, man has more need for shelter than many animals that regularly build shelters. Those animals that do not build shelters seek shelter from cold, heat, rain and strong wind.

Man ran into trouble when he began to build shelters that excluded the air, so that he lived in non-ventilated abodes. He got into trouble when he made stationary shelters that could not be moved as the land became insanitary. These evils necessitated that he find ways to provide for ventilation and ways to carry off the filth. When we observe animals cleaning their nests and burrows, we may think that man’s instincts also led him to undertake to clean his abodes and surroundings much earlier than archeologists have found.

I do not think that it is possible, on the basis of the meager data we possess, to determine what were the primitive sexual practices of mankind. As a healthy, unperverted animal, we should naturally expect him to follow certain modes of sexual conduct, but we cannot, on the basis of the data we have, assert that he did so. We may be certain that human beings mated, just as animals mate, and that until very recent times, they did not purchase a marriage license, that their unions were not recorded, and that, prior to the rise of the priestcraft and for a long time thereafter, they clid not have their unions solemnized by the priestly ceremonials. They mated, cohabited, reared their children and, for the most part, it seems, were monogamous. Lifelong unions may have been the rule, although we cannot assert this to have been so.

Greek mythology strongly suggests that the prehistoric Greeks practiced polygamy and incest. Indeed, incest or mating of near-of-kin was practiced by all the nations of antiquity and is still practiced in much of the modem world. The practice was in full flower at the dawn of history and must have been carried over from the prehistoric era. It is almost the rule in the animal kingdom and is employed by animal breeders, under the term in-breeding, to improve their stock. Mendelian experiences have shown it to be a means of channeling undesirable traits out of a breed. It is certainly not the unmixed evil commonly supposed.

The evolutionist assumes that man is descended from some unknown primate. Incest is the normal mode of mating among living primates. If man’s origin was as they think, incest has been normal with man from the very beginning of his existence as man. The Christian believes that God created a single human pair and that all mankind are descended from the single pair. This means that the children of Adam and Eve had nobody to mate with except their brothers and sisters. The second generation could mate only with brothers and sisters or with “double cousins.’’ Even the mating of Adam and Eve was a closer union than a brother and sister union, for Eve was made from Adam. It was a case of self-fertilization or the mating of identical twins of opposite sexes. After the flood, when but three reproducible human pairs were left alive, the marriage of close of kin had to begin all over again. Accept either the creation or the transformation hypothesis and we have incest as the normal way of life. Incest was common practice among the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Hebrews and many other peoples at the dawn of history and long thereafter. What other conclusion can be drawn but that it was a prehistoric practice?

Polygamy, common to many peoples throughout history and still practiced in some portions of the earth, including America, was always confined to the few who were wealthy enough or powerful enough to secure and support more than one wife. The evidence that polygamy was a primitive practice is not very strong and it is hardly likely that it was ever a general practice.

How many of the wasteful and perverted sexual practices found among mankind today were practiced by primitive man and how widely they were practiced we cannot determine. Masturbation, coitus interruptus (the true Onanism), Sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, coitus reservatus, infanticide, wife stealing, wife killing, and many other sexual practices that have been and are widely employed would seem, on the basis of what we observe in the lower orders, to have been rare to non-existent. Certain of these practices seem to have been widely indulged at the dawn of history. How far back into prehistory they extended is something that we cannot determine.

To this point our researches and considerations have brought out the fact that primitive man’s modes of caring for the well and the sick had their foundation in the actual needs of the body. These are basic, no matter what other modes of care are employed. Man, no more than the animals, needed a knowledge of anatomy and physiology to know that he needed food, water, air, activity, rest and sleep, warmth, cleanliness, sunshine, shelter, etc., and that there is definite repugnance to food in acute illness and when severely wounded. When he was ill and did not feel like being active, he needed no knowledge of physiology to impel him to rest. Life makes its genuine needs known by unmistakable signs and sensations in the form of appetites, desires, hungers, drives, pains, discomforts, disinclinations, etc.—in a word, in instinctive demands, for the things needed. Experience, if not instinct, taught man the value of moderation and the evils of excess.

Prehistoric man lived under many and varied circumstances, had a wide variety of experiences and he must have learned from these. Archeology and anthropology supply us with a wealth of facts that indicate that primitive man was a very intelligent being, perhaps even more intelligent than we are. No doubt certain of primitive man’s hygienic regulations, were empirically discovered and were not instinctive. The instinctive hygienic practices that he brought with him into the historic period belong to him as a way of life and antedate, in their origin, the system of magic that originated sometime prior to the dawn of history. The rudiments of the drug system may have come along with the magic, although this is by no means certain. The herbal substances used by the magi (later by the leeches) were a part of their ceremonials and were not used as healing agents. Surgery, largely as massage, also came from the prehistoric period as a means of caring for wounds and hurts. Prehistoric man knew no system of medicine; he had no conception of cure and employed no so-called therapeutic modalities.

Chapter 5: MAN'S ORIGINAL HYGIENE

Ancient Hygiene is properly regarded as a continuation of Primitive Hygiene. Inasfar as it differed from Primitive Hygiene, it represents an adjustment of the total pattern of life to the changed conditions of man’s environment.

History does not so much replace prehistory as succeed it. To a great extent history is the flowering of prehistory. In all civilizations there exists a rich and continuous prehistory. If this is true, certain important conclusions are permissible. Perhaps the first and most important of these is that man brought his prehistoric practices and customs into history and continued them long thereafter as integral parts of his way of life. Indeed, much of what we call modem life is traceable to man’s prehistoric way of living. It is essential for us to keep in mind, as we study our subjects, that there is a basic unity and continuity of man’s total pattern of life, reaching all the way back to his origin and extending to the present.

At the very dawn of history man was in possession of a knowledge of living that could not have been based upon any knowledge of physiology. He possessed a knowledge of the effects of emotions that could not have been based upon any great psychological research. His ways of life, crude as we may often think them, were of a character to meet adequately his animal needs. From whence came this knowledge if not from the instinctive way of life which he shared with the animals beneath him in the scale of being? Man has always possessed a set of rules of conduct that was common to the whole race. Hygienic advice is common to mankind and is not the findings of any professional group.

The medical historian, Cumston, who attempts to discover an instinctive basis for the absurd and damaging practices called medicine, says that hygiene, which he thinks is derived from physiology and etiology, “is contemporary with the study of disease, or perhaps it were better to say, was bom from the terror, rather than the knowledge of disease.” Contradicting this statement he says that hygiene “had been an art before it became a science,” and that “in Egypt, and in all the Orient, hygiene was a part of religious worship. With the Greeks hygiene became a science and has progressed from their days on.” The Greeks had much knowledge of hygiene, but it is false to say that there has been progress in hygiene from their age to this. There was a long period during which hygiene was neglected by the people, by the priests and by the medical profession, its modem revival being achieved against strong medical opposition.

Cleanliness (purity) is one of the basic elements of hygiene. A knowledge of the importance of cleanliness has been in mankind’s possession since the dawn of recorded history. Religious leaders like Moses and Mohammed taught cleanliness to their followers. The ritual baths of the ancient religious orders were often nothing more than magic substitutes for real purity. On the other hand, it now seems evident that the baptism of the ancient Essenes was but admission to the daily baths taken by the members of the community.

Because they fail to distinguish between the genuine and the feigned, Orthodox writers like Calder say that hygiene is derived from cult-cleanliness. Such a statement implies that bathing (cleanliness) constitutes the whole of hygiene and overlooks the fact that “cult-cleanliness” could have arisen only after the origin of cults. These came at a rather late period in human existence.

Cleanliness is coeval with life. It is a prerequisite of organic existence. Bathing has been practiced by man since his introduction upon the earth. The first peoples of the earth immersed themselves frequently in rivers, lakes, and in the sea. Our records are not old enough to provide for us the names and practices of our most primitive ancestors, but our oldest records do reveal men and women bathing at the very dawn of recorded history.

When Isis, in the Egyptian myth, visited Syria in her search of the body of the slain Osiris, she came to a splashing “lively fountain where the ladies of Queen Ishtar of Syria came every afternoon to bathe.” Pharaoh’s daughter is pictured to us bathing in the Nile. Nausica and her companions and also Agenow are presented to us bathing in the river, and we learn of the Amazons refreshing themselves in the waters of Thermodon. The Greeks plunged their tender infants into cold torrents; Moschus and Themocritus have Europa bathe in the Anaurus and the Spartan girls bathe in the Eurotas. Early Vedic literature reveals the Aryans as frequently bathing. In the beautiful Indian myth of Rama and Sita, we learn that Rama fasted; he, his brother and Sita drank spring water and bathed each morning in the river. Before man learned to provide household facilities for bathing, streams, lakes, ponds and oceans constituted his bathtubs.

Domestic baths were not unknown in the early ages of history. Diomedes and Ulysses are each represented as making use of such after they had washed in the sea. Andromache prepared warm water for Hector, who had just returned from battle, while Penelope, to banish sorrow, called for the aid of unctions and baths. Minerva at Thermopylae, is feigned to have imparted, by such means, vapor to the wearied limbs of Hercules and, in place of other gifts, Vulcan offered him warm baths.

Pindar praises the warm springs of the Nymphs, while Homer himself, who stressed the pleasures of bathing, not only makes mention of a hot and vaporous spring adjoining a cold one, but even describes to us baths which, by common tradition, were situated near Scamander in the vicinity of Troy. Warm springs, cold springs, and mineral springs were all employed as places in which to bathe and thus cleanse the body, long before there was a bathtub. Here I need but allude to the natural warm baths of Bithynia and Myt£lene mentioned by Pliny, and to those of the Etruscans, as among the baths most early and extensively known and resorted to.

Purity meant not only physical cleanliness, as provided by bathing, but purity of thought and action. The Egyptian idea of leading lives in truth and harmony was old when Memphis was founded. At the entrance of the temple of Epidaurus (in Greece) were these words: “Pure must be he who enters the fragrant temple; purity means to think nothing but holy thoughts.” The sick had to bathe and put on a white chiton, after which he sacrificed to the gods—honey, cake, fruit or a rooster, according to his means. Everywhere cleanliness was enjoined.

Female chastity and manly virtue were alike demanded, not only as a means of preserving the integrity of the individual, but also as safeguards of the integrity of the family and race. The ancient writer who declared that the “debauched man finds no peace in the body of his flesh,” expressed an understanding of the results of debauchery that is often lacking today, even among the presumably educated, whether we think of intemperance or sensuality.

Modem man is hungry for a lost purity and freshness. He is suffering from a dearth of vigor and a lack of enthusiasm for life. He even doubts that life has any value of its own. He takes refuge in an escapist, hedonistic pessimism that runs to immorality rather than to glorious living. He rejects the happy life and retreats into the pessimism of Sartre or a Joseph Wood Krutch.

Among many ancient people, cleansing the body and moderation in eating and drinking were raised to the status of divine commands. The ancient lawgivers seem to have realized that, unless man has it repeated over and over to him that he must take proper care of himself, he will become neglectful and careless. Perhaps this is the reason they made cleanliness and dietary regulations and other elements of their hygiene a part of their religions.

How long man lived upon the earth before he acquired the practice of drinking alcohol is something we will probably never know, but some of his alcoholic liquors seem to have been drunk in prehistory. It seems, also, that he early learned to recognize that “wine is a mocker and strong drink a delusion.” Archilochus of Paros referred to his senses being “thundered away by wine.”

Temperance was taught by religious leaders and philosophers long before there was a medical profession even in rudimentary form. While today the practice of abstaining from wine and fermented beverages is commonly referred to the ascetic pattern of life, there seems to me to be no valid reason to so castigate this wholesome practice. Our condemnation of the drinking practice rests on the fact (we are convinced that it is a fact) that it is opposed to the primal order of creation.

As diet shall be discussed in a separate chapter, brief references to this part of ancient hygiene will be made at this place and I shall begin at the beginning, with the care given infants.

We are informed that childbirth among the Babylonians was “evidently satisfactory” and this was so in complete absence of physicians and the meddlesome midwifery of the present. The same satisfaction with birth seems to have been true in Egypt, the remainder of the Orient, in Greece and elsewhere. In Egypt babies were nursed up to three years, wet nurses being employed to provide milk for the infant if the mother’s supply failed. In ancient Mesopotamia, as in all the ancient East, babies were nursed for the first three years by their mothers. If the mother’s milk failed, and the parents could afford it, a wet nurse was engaged to supplant the deficient mother. In Greece, as elsewhere in antiquity, babies were breast fed for a long time, usually two to three years. If the mother died, or could not nurse her baby, the baby was fed by a wet nurse. The cow and goat were not called upon to adopt the human young. Such are still the practices among living so-called primitives.

On the basis of the archeological evidence that has been amassed, many authorities are convinced that civilization had its beginnings in Sumer, although there are those who hold that Egypt was the birth place of civilization. Sumer was succeeded by Babylon, the Babylonians taking over the Sumerian culture and adding little to it. Indeed the whole civilization of Chaldea, Ur, Mesopotamia, Babylon, Assyria and the remainder of the Mediterranean Crescent was one civilization. It is difficult to separate them in our thinking. It is important, however, that we understand that in any consideration of the way of life of a people it is necessary to include both private and community hygiene (this latter being commonly thought of as sanitation). Hygiene is the science and art of establishing (or reestablishing) and preserving a high standard of physical and mental excellence; sanitation is the science and art of establishing and maintaining a livable environment. The first involves the care of the body and mind; the second involves the solutions of community problems.

The Sumerians and Babylonians developed elaborate sewage systems, had a weekly day of rest, built irrigation canals, had a calendar, mathematics, archives and libraries.

Ur was one of the largest of the Sumerian cities and may serve us as a model of other Sumerian cities. The houses in Ur consisted of

thirteen or fourteen rooms grouped around a central courtyard. “From the street the main door opened into a hall which usually had a small pool for washing the feet.” This led into the courtyard which was paved with brick and was provided with pipe to drain away the rain water. Light entered through the doors and no windows were provided. ^f

The Sumerians bathed frequently according to their surviving traditions. In the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, we find the hero stripping and bathing.

Babylonian life in general was made up of hard work, but there were times of rest and recreation; there were dancing and singing and music; there were games and there was sailing on the river; there were festivals and holidays. A weekly day of rest in Babylon, the successor of a similar rest day in Sumer and probably the precursor of the Hebrew Sabbath, established an elementary rhythm in man’s activities by providing for a day of rest and recreation every seven days, and this constituted a measure of both physical and mental hygiene.

Like the Egyptians, the Babylonians were clean, purity being an important concept with them. Only the rich had bathtubs and employed mixtures of oil and potash (a crude soap) in bathing. Palaces of the rich in Babylon had bathrooms with asphalt floors and toilets that flushed the excreta away. Palaces and other larger buildings were fitted with regular sewers, vaulted brick conduits that caught the rain water, bath water, excreta and other refuse and drained it away.

The Babylonians washed their hands before meals, a thing that is seen among all peoples who eat with their fingers. They also poured water over their hands after meals.

While the better homes of Babylon had bathrooms, the working class took their baths in the canals or in water cisterns in the courtyards, occasionally varying the routine with vapor baths, in the manner of the Sythians, that of pouring water on very hot stones in a sealed room. They employed massage in connection with their baths and used terra-cotta instruments as scrapers (stirgils), which were commonly used in the ancient world.

Everybody except the very poor anointed the body and hair with oil after the bath. It is said that this was done to stifle the nits and parasites that were and now are so common in Mesopotamia. Perhaps the ashes employed in bathing also deprived the skin of its normal oily secretion, thus leaving the skin dry.

Although Tacitus credited the Germans with the invention of soap, archeologists find traces of what they call soap in Mesopotamia used as long ago as five thousand years. They are said to have produced a medicated soap composed of salt, cassia oil and powdered asafoetida. They probably had no idea that it was a medicated substance; this is a modem interpretation. It is declared, however, that this “curious concoction” and various other “soaps” that followed it, were used for centuries as a ritualistic symbol rather than as a soap. This probably supplies us with a key to its use. It was a magic or ritualistic preparation and not a cleansing agent. It is even suggested that these soaps were used as drugs, an effort merely to push the medical practice back far beyond the time of its origin.

A crude form of “soap” was made by the Babylonians consisting of the ashes of rush, which was rich in potash or soda, oil and clay. They seem to have had both a homemade soap and one that was on sale generally. This soap was somewhat abrasive and had none of the detergent qualities of modem soaps. It is said that the ashes of the reed they used in making their soap was still used in laundering.

In Mesopotamia, little clothing was worn, except in cold weather. Laborers wore nothing more than a string belt or strong girdle. Women wore a rectangular piece of cloth draped in folds over the left shoulder, similar to the Roman toga, with sometimes a heavy bonnet, while reminiscences of primitive nudity survived in certain cults. It is characteristic of cults that they tend to preserve ancient practices long after they have ceased to be the general custom. The devout Aryan, for example, took care never to dirty flowing water, a probable survival of primitive practice.

Of great celebrity were the baths of the Assyrians, Medes, and Persians. To such a pitch of grandeur were they carried by the Persians that Alexander, himself, accustomed as he was to the voluptuous baths of Greece and Macedonia, was astonished at the luxury and magnificence of the baths of Darius.

The early Persians bathed as regularly as they took their meals. To the Persian religion popular writers, like Calder, give credit for bringing to medicine the cult of cleanliness, thus overlooking the historical fact that we are not indebted to medicine for the practices of cleanliness. Medicine never adopted cleanliness; it was forced upon the medical system. In addition to the regular bathing, Persian youths were given physical training. Indeed, in most ancient civilizations, physical training of youth was common.

Primitive man, so long as he lived in small groups and lived in no fixed abode had no difficulty about sewage disposal, but when he began to live in towns this element of sanitation became very important. Means of sewage disposal had to be developed and this was done early. It is thought that the sewage systems of the Canaanites, for example, probably preceded those of Crete by several centuries.

On the ruins of the Canaanite civilization, which they largely destroyed, the Israelites built their civilization. The Hebrews apparently gave scant attention to physical training, but devoted much attention to personal cleanliness. Their hygiene was inseparable from their religion. Among the ancient Jews, and to a large extent among the orthodox Jews of today, dietary regulations were and are part and parcel of their religion. The Book of Leviticus contains many hygienic and sanitary regulations and rules. These deal with what were regarded as proper foods and their preparation, with clean and unclean objects, the hygiene of childbirth, and menstruation, the prevention of contagion, the isolation of infected sick, the disinfection of their property, even to the extent of scraping the walls of their house or tearing them down. Physicians came to Israel in the closing centuries of the nation, coming from other countries, probably principally from Greece, but this was after the origin of so-called ‘’Hippocratic medicine.” The Jews had some conception of what has been called “human contagion.” When they are said to have been the first to recognize contagion, we must bear in mind that they had no such idea as that current today.

Hygiene, in its ultimate sense is constituted of the total pattern of life and has reference to the way in which an organism normally lives. Viewed in this light much of a people’s hygiene is made up of its customary modes of living. Among the ancient Egyptians, for example, life was lived largely in the open air and sunshine, so that conscious attention to these elemental factors of hygiene was not required.

The sun-worshipping Egyptians did not regard the sun as merely the fierce all-pervading source of heat that drove men into shade at midday, but thought of the sun as also the gentle source of life in all created things. Their Hymn to Aten says:

Thou appearest beautifully on the horizon of heaven.

Thou living Aten, the beginning of life;

When thou art risen on the eastern horizon

Thou has filled every land with thy beauty.

It is a long hymn to the sun god, the giver of life. It is sobering to recall that there are men of science today who have not gotten beyond this concept of the ancient Egyptians. They regard the sun as the source of life.

It is interesting to note that, in spite of their many superstitions, the Egyptians regarded their country as salubrious, and took several excellent precautions to preserve their health. They selected their diet, were cleanly (bathing often), wore white linen garments, washed before meals, lived an active open-air life in the sun, rested each afternoon and retired to sleep early. The life of the rich in ancient Egypt is described as “a pleasant and gracious life,” although for the slaves and free workers it was a hard lot. It is noteworthy that Herodotus was much impressed by the good health conditions he found in Egypt. That they took laxatives, wore amulets and charms and talismans with magic words on them is but part of their superstitions.

The Egyptians lived largely in the open air, the people frequently working, eating and sleeping outdoors. They employed the house to protect against the sun's rays during the summer heat and at the time of midday rest. This afternoon sleep was common throughout the ancient world in the tropics and during the summertime elsewhere.

Adult Egyptians wore little clothing. Neither Egyptian boys nor girls wore any clothes and they continued to run about naked until they were several years old. Egyptian children played games and indulged in athletic contests some of which are still with us today.

In Egypt, as everywhere else in the ancient world, the nights were devoted to sleeping. Outside the bed chamber there was little night life. The practice of retiring early and arising early was everywhere observed. Lighting facilities were meager and difficult to obtain. It was not possible to turn the night into day as we have done in modem times.

Sigerist says that "it is a general rule that the less clothing a people wears, the cleaner it keeps the body. The Egyptians were no exception to this rule, and rich and poor washed frequently, morning and evening and before every meal." They were also careful to regularly wash the vessels from which they ate and drank and washed their linen frequently. The Egyptian priests are said to have bathed and anointed themselves daily to “purify their ideals.” even, for good measure, so it is said, bathing the graven images of then gods.

In the homes of the wealthier classes there were shower baths. Recall that the Egyptian princess who found the infant Moses among the reeds at the river’s bank, had gone down to the river to bathe. The story' is similar to an older legend about the finding of the infant Sargon in the same way. but it is of interest to us here as indicating that the princess had probably gone swimming. Certainly to take a bath, she was not under necessity to expose herself in this manner, as she could have bathed in some secluded spot in the domain of her father, the Pharaoh, or perhaps in the palace itself.

The Egyptians perfumed the oils with which they anointed themselves, but smearing the body with olive oil does not seem to have been too much practiced by the upper classes of ancient Egypt. In the Egyptian story of Sinuhe. the young Egyptian heir to the throne who fled in fear when he heard of the death of his father, and joined a band of Syrian nomads, we got the story that after a few years he returned to Egypt and he says: ".And I was arrayed in the finest linen and anointed with the best oil. I slept on a bed. and gave up the sand to those who live there, and the olive oil to him that smeareth himself therewith.” What oil other than olive oil was used? Rax oil was abundant in Egypt.

Crete (the Caphthoe of the Bible—the Philistines were also of Aegean origin and were an uncircumcised people; was one of the oldest and most advanced of the ancient civilizations. The Minoans or Cretans were a long-headed type of humanity who preceded the Greeks. They, like the Egyptians, seem to have belonged to that slightly copper-colored race known as the Mediterranean. The warm Cretan sun as well as the Egyptian sun, may have accounted for the suntanned color of both peoples. The near nudity of the Cretans and Mycenaean provided ample opportunity for tanning. The Cretans are described as a peace-loving people but this description will fit all people in all parts of the world and in all ages of history. Man is normally a peaceable animal, and unless frenzied by warmongers, hates war.

The Cretans relied heavily upon sanitation and hygiene. Indeed, there is an abundance of evidence that they led simple, active outdoor lives, were clean, were exposed to the sun, understood the importance of rest and sleep and of emotional poise, and were frugal in their eating habits, also that they fasted when ill.

The very ancient Cretan myth tells us of Zeus being bathed by two watchful maidens who looked after him. As his mother had hidden him away from his father, Cronos, who would have devoured him, he was fed upon milk from a long-haired mountain goat and upon honey which was brought to him by pigeons. An eagle brought him nectar from the lavender mountain crocus. The absence of flesh from the diet of young Zeus is significant.

In Crete there were bathrooms and baths; they ate three daily meals, morning, midday and evening, washing their hands before eating. They drank wine, but never took it undiluted. They possessed an elaborate system of physical education and spent much of their time in the open.

The kings and queens of Crete passed their spare hours in gardens and spreading lawns. Their city was a beautiful city, where even the poor were better off than in other kingdoms. The summer palaces near Phaistos on Crete, were elaborate structures, with stone staircases and elaborate plumbing systems.

The Cretans paid great attention to sanitary measures and provided for drainage and disposal of waste products in their cities. No sanitary structures of the type found in Crete and elsewhere in Ageae are to be found in Greek cities of the Alexandrian period. Walker says that “it is now realized that the Minoan civilization, like many other ancient civilizations, was far more advanced than the archeologists of an older school believed it to be. It was particularly advanced in matters of Public Health. The drainage systems, water supply, bathing arrangements and methods of disposal of refuse uncovered in the excavation of Minoan cities are much superior to those which existed in the British Isles in the time of the Stuarts. It is likely therefore, that the Greeks, in the process of overrunning the Minoan cities in Eastern

Europe, in about the year 1,000 B.C.—Troy was one of the last of the Minoan strongholds—learned a great deal from the people whom they vanquished.”

J. C. Stobart says in his book The Glory That Was Greece: “The plumber will find a paradise in Cnossos. There are lavatories, sinks, sewers, and manholes. Let me quote Professor Burrows: ‘The main drain which had its sides coated with cement, was over three feet high, and nearly two feet broad, so that a man could easily move along it; and the smaller stone shafts that discharged into it are still in position. Further north we have preserved for us some of the terracotta pipes that served for connections. Each of them was about two-and-one-half feet long, with a diameter that was about six inches at the broad end and narrowed to less than four inches at the mouth, where it fitted into the broad end of the next pipe. Jamming was carefully prevented by a stop-ridge that ran round the outside of each narrow end a few inches from the mouth, while the inside of the butt, or broader end, was provided with a raised collar that enabled it to bear the pressure of the next pipe’s stop-ridge and gave an extra hold for the cement that bound the two ends together.’ Let no cultivated reader despise these details. There is no truer sign of civilization and culture than good sanitation. It goes with refined senses and orderly habits. A good drain implies as much as a beautiful statue. And let it be remembered that the world did not reach the Minoan standard of cleanliness again until the great sanitary movement of the late nineteenth century.”

Describing a building at Tiryns, Stobart says: “There is an elaborate bathroom, with drainpipes and water-supply hot and cold.”

Interesting as it might prove to know with what diseases the Cretans and the Mycenaean Greeks suffered and what means they employed with which to care for their sick, no written records of these matters exist and, as Sigerist so truly remarks, “archeology merely tells us that the palaces of Mycenae, like those of Cnossus, had bathrooms, toilets and a drainage system.” This is to say, we do have evidence that these people did rely upon hygiene and sanitation. The royal palace at Cnossus was fitted with bathrooms and drainage similar to those found in Egyptian and Mesopotamian palaces of the period.

Unlike the other peoples of the period, the Cretans were not afraid of the dead and manifested no fear of ghosts. This probably indicated that their religion was not of the fear-instilling type and may be assumed to have been the foundation for the relative absence of fear from the Greek religion of a subsequent period.

Going now to the Indus Valley civilization of India, which was contemporary with that of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Crete, the medical historian Sigerist is on firm ground when he says of the “public health facilities” of Mohenjo Daro, which was “probably the oldest planned city of which we know,” that they “were superior to those of any other ancient city of the Orient. Almost all houses had bathrooms. Bathrooms were not uncommon in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Crete, but there we find them only in palaces or in homes of the rich. The fact that they were so numerous in the Indus dities perhaps means that they had not only a hygienic but also a ritual purpose, as they still have in India today.”

“The bathrooms were built near the wall that faced the street, and the water was drained through pipes into covered sewers that ran under the street ... in several houses latrines have been found, water closets, with a drainage system similar to that of the bathrooms.” In one monumental building of this city “eight small bathrooms were located in the northern end of the building.”

Sigerist says that “the sewage system of Mohenjo Daro is truly impressive.” He refers to the “elaborate public health system of the cities,” but since “we have no written archeological records” until after the Aryan invasion some five hundred years after the destruction of the Indus Valley civilization, he is forced to guess that they had drugs and physicians. The evidence reveals that the people of the Indus Valley civilization were cleanly and had adequate sanitary systems; it provides no hint of a medical system. Mankind relied upon hygiene both to preserve health and to restore health before it was shunted into false ways by the medical profession.

The people of the Indus Valley civilization wore simple clothing made of cotton spun into cloth by the women; a short skirt with ornamental belt was worn by women.

The Indus Valley civilization presents us with colonnaded buildings, baths, granaries, mills and communal ovens. The evidence shows that the people of the Indus Valley civilization placed great emphasis on bathing. At Mohenjo Daro there was an impressive great bath, which may have been communal. The homes of the wealthy were equipped with elaborate bathrooms; a complex drainage system under the streets was connected with the drains of the homes. It is said that there is little room for doubt that the general standard of health and of sanitation was remarkably high. The municipal sewage system and the presence of bathtubs, a fixed latrine seat draining into a receptacle in the street, in some of the houses of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, testify to the remarkable thinking of the planners of these prehistoric cities.

At Mohenjo Daro the houses contained bathrooms and latrines, often on two floors. Earthenware drains encased in brick carried sewage away from the houses and numerous inspection holes indicate that they were regularly cleaned. The drains and bathing establishments of Mohenjo Daro are one of the wonders of archeology. Of such public works as cisterns, sewers, etc., in the Indus Valley, archeologists inform us that they were “of a particularly high standard.”

Some speculators, basing their conjecture on a few obscure passages in the older Vedic literature, think that the Indus Valley civilization was destroyed somewhere between 1500 and 800 B.C. by Indo-European invaders.

Our knowledge of life in Greece is more full and complete than is our knowledge of life in Sumer, Babylon and most of the other nations of antiquity. The Greeks borrowed liberally from their neighbors so that in studying the story of Greece we learn much of preceding and contemporaneous civilizations.

The Greek story begins long before its recorded history. Homer’s heroes made efforts to preserve their health and fitness. Frugal meals, although they enjoyed banquets on festive occasions, wine mixed with water (drunkenness being frowned upon), a variety of exercises, games, sports and contests of strength and skill, commonly in the open air, cleanliness (besides their bathrooms at home, they bathed while at war), scanty clothing that permitted free access of sun and air to their bodies—these are but some of the elements of what was a healthful mode of life.

Writing of Greece Sigerist says that, “Physical education, athletics, and sports were at all times powerful measures in the promotion of health, in the development of a concept of positive health and a jovial attitude toward life. It is the educational ideal much more than medical considerations that determined the status of physical education—in Athens, for instance—large-scale measures of public health, on the other hand, the building of aqueducts, the drainage of swamps, housing projects for large groups of people, can be expected only where there was a state power strong enough to carry out such measures.” He fails, however, to mention that the educational ideals, the concept of a positive ideal of health and the sanitary projects all came into existence in advance of the medical profession.

Pausanius says that there was a statue of Hygeia (daughter of Asklepius) on the Acropolis and another of Athena, “which they also name Hygeia.” This would indicate that the Athenians had a goddess of health. In Sparta there was a temple dedicated to Athena Ophthalmitis, goddess of the eye. According to Spartan tradition, this temple had been founded by Lycurgus himself.

The Greeks taught a love of beauty and an unashamed delight of the body. The Greeks and Romans knew the importance of exercise before there was a medical profession among them. It is not without significance, although it may not be true, that Asklepius has been called the Father of Gymnastics. Pythagoras stressed the importance of cleanliness, exercise and proper food long before the time of Hippocrates.

Athenian children played nude as did children everywhere in Greece. Jumping and wresting were favorite sports among the young Greeks. Writers often speak of the “hard sunburnt body of the Free Athenian.” They also contrast it with the soft, white body of the Athenian who lived indoors and took little exercise. After Achilles had honored his dead friend, Patroclus, at Troy, games were held. The Greeks engaged in running, boxing, dueling, spear throwing, chariot racing, archery, wresting and throwing the javelin.

Women and girls took part in athletic activities in Greece from earliest time. When Nausica, whom Athena had promoted in a dream to bring the family linen to the mouth of the river to wash, had arrived with her girls, she gave her a golden bottle of olive oil for softening the girls’ bodies after bathing. After the wash had been completed and the clothes had been spread along the beach to dry, the girls took a dip themselves, and anointed with golden oil, ate lunch beside the river. “While the bright burning sun dried out their linen, and Princess and maids delighted in the feast” they enjoyed exercise on the river’s bank. Then putting off their veils, they ran and passed a ball to a rhythmic beat; Nausica flashing first with her white arms.

In Greece, the work day was long but there was the inevitable siesta that gave the worker, including the slave, a break and a rest. The siesta was an almost universal custom in ancient times and, in most of the world, has survived down to the present. Our industrial civilization is slowly destroying this healthful practice and has substituted for it the modem unhealthful “coffee break.”

In Greece, the daily bath was the custom. Babies were washed at birth and then swaddled. Traditions of bathing by the Greeks reach far back into prehistory. The Iliad recounts that Ulysses and Diomedes, upon returning from battle, went at once to the sea to wash off the sweat and to cool off, after which they had a bath in a tub and were anointed with oil. When Odysseus was received by Queen Arete and her king, he made a stir among the people of the little kingdom by an enormous discus-throw. “But the things,” the king pointed out, “in which we take perennial delight are the feast, the lyre, the dance, clean linen in plenty, a hot bath and our beds.” When Agamemnon returned home from his ten years’ siege of Troy, his unfaithful wife, Clytemnestra, had a bath prepared for him. Indeed, it was in the bath that she treacherously murdered him.

Sigerist says that the “Greek word for diet had a much broader meaning than we give it today. By diet, the Greeks meant a man’s entire mode of living, the relations between sleep and being awake, between exercise and rest, and of course, also the choice of food, the quantity to be consumed, evacuations, and all other factors that constitute a man’s life and must be under control if the individual is to be not only healthy but also strong and beautiful.” He adds that as it was the work of the physical trainers to supervise the diet of the Greeks, ‘"These trainers were great experts in matters of hygiene.” Cumston confirms Sigerist, saying that the Greek word, translated regimen, “has not the limited sense that it has in English. Besides diet, it includes baths, massage, and gymnastics, all of which were in high repute, and might perhaps be well translated by ‘treatment’.” His effort to substitute the term “treatment” for the older terms regimen and dietetics, is an effort to conceal the fact that it involved not treatment but a regulation of the mode of life of the individual—well or sick fbionomy).

The Greek term would, perhaps, be better translated by the term hygiene, as we employ this word today. It was a way of life, and was ordered by the Greeks for a long period before there was a physician to meddle with it by the employment of his drugs—poisons. The curse of the world has been the effort of the medical profession to substitute drugs for the correct way of life (orthobionomy). They have sought to supplant good habits of living with their poisons. Instead of correcting the bad mental and physical habits of their patients and substituting good habits for them, they have condoned and often advised the continuance of the bad habits and advised that the sufferer take a pill or a potion, a shot in the arm, or have his organs removed.

When it is stated by medical historians that Rome’s contribution to medicine lay in the realm of hygiene and public health, we witness another effort of the medical historian to make the term medicine cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. The Romans were justifiably suspicious of the physicians as everyone else seems to have been. Long before the time of Hippocrates, they had inaugurated sanitary measures that had more value to both individual and public health than all the drugs ever used and all the physicians that ever lived. They kept the streets of their cities clean, attended to the water supply, brought water to Rome through fourteen great aqueducts, established great public baths throughout the empire, were frugal in their eating habits, were active in outdoor work and wore scanty clothing. They were basically vegetarian. The Romans took onlv a glass of water in the morning, cold meat and fruit at midday; the main meal was taken after the day's work was completed.

No other civilization erected the buildings for bathing, exercise, recreation and amusement that even remotely compared with those of Imperial Rome. One of the most famous of these, the Baths of Carcacalla in Rome, included an area of more than twenty acres, and was fitted with reading rooms, auditoria, running tracks, covered walks and planted gardens, surrounding a single unified building which alone covered six. acres. The halls of this central building were so vast that thousands at a time could wander through them; there were rooms with a vaulted ceiling seventy feet above the floor; an enclosed swimming pool two hundred feet long; and a steam room half as large as the Pantheon. Besides acres of mosaic flooring and thousands of costly marble veneering, there were hundreds of bronze and marble statues. Large as was this recreation center, it was but one of seven such centers in Rome. In every Province of the Empire, in Germany, England, France, Spain, North Africa, Asia Minor, there were similar but somewhat smaller baths. The bad feature, of the larger baths, at least, was that the slaves who fired the furnaces that warmed them and heated the water, lived a mole-like existence underground.

The Cloaca Maxima was constructed in the earliest days of Rome and not after the rise of the medical profession. The drainage systems of other Roman cities were also pre-Hippocratic feats of engineering; even in England, they established drainage systems that the English permitted to deteriorate and did not revive until well within the eighteenth century.

The Romans made their public baths beautiful architectural monuments and bathing became a national passion. In the Roman towns were numerous baths, the elaborate and efficient heating systems of which reveal how well the ancient builders understood the principles of heating by hot air. In Rome the public baths were patronized by most people. Some of the wealthier Romans had baths in their own homes, although they also patronized the public baths.

A people’s bathing practices may serve as an index to their general system of hygiene. From Calidonia on the west to Cathay and Nippon on the east and to India and Cambodia on the south, mankind bathed regularly and often. The practice of bathing in running water is widespread in India and this is probably man’s original way of bathing. The Hindus also scrupulously cleanse their teeth.

The ancient Cambodians bathed each morning and cleansed their teeth with little pieces of poplar wood. They made frequent use of the bath. The women bathed in the rivers and are described by Chinese travelers as having “no shame about leaving their clothes on the river bank and going into the water.” As they gathered in numbers for these baths, the baths are described as events of hilarity. They must have sunbathed while taking their baths in the river. Like Adam and Eve in the ancient garden, they were naked and unashamed. It may truly be said, to paraphrase a famous American, that God must like nudity, he made so much of it.

In China a big tub of hot water was used in which to bathe. The children were bathed, the mother washed herself thoroughly daily, and the Chinese never sat down to a meal without first having bathed. The Chinese, like the Japanese, are fond of the hot bath. Even the Chinese junks of a few hundred years ago had private baths aboard for members of the families of the wealthy. Japanese homes are kept spotlessly clean, but Japanese people are even more scrupulous about

bodily cleanliness. Every home contains a simple bathroom.

Throughout the long course of prehistory, through the whole of the period of protohistory, and right down to about the time of Alexander the Great, mankind got along without the doubtful services of physicians. For a considerable time during this long period, the sick relied upon theurgy (religion) and thaumaturgy (magic) and took no so-called internal medication. In speaking of the patriarchal age, Dr. Trail said of the “fine old boys of the Hygiene age” that they “took no calomel or blue pill, nor prostrating cathartics, and there is no mention of bleeding or blistering.” The records are admittedly fragmentary, but sufficiently full to make it quite certain that no drugging was practiced anywhere in the world prior to the Hippocratic era.

Mankind seems to have gotten along very well without physicians and drugs. Homer mentions what appears to have been a minor epidemic among the Greek soldiers at Troy. As the Greeks had no physicians, no vaccines and no serums, they met the problems in the time-honored way. They sacrificed a handful of bullocks to Apollo. Homer does not mention any deaths from the epidemic. From this it may logically be inferred that the sacrifices were effective. Nearly 2,000 years elapsed after the origin of the drugging practice before armies carried physicians with them and before ships carried physicians on their voyages. The medical practice did not circle the globe overnight.

From the standpoint of the well-being and happiness of mankind it is important for us to understand how mankind managed to survive through this long period of time without the saving potencies of the physician’s drugs. Only a solution of the problem that squares with the principles that underlie the phenomena of life can gain universal acceptance. Certainly, the solutions that have been offered from the laboratories of the world have not squared with biological principles. While the most startling aspect of this matter is yet to come, we can formulate our solution only in general terms, allowing individual and temporary deviations from the general pattern of preHippocratic care, but allowing no adventitious elements to enter our explanation. Truly, when we have fully grasped the profound significance of the picture this presents, an extraordinary climactic lyrical spasm will emit from the throat of the world.

Chapter 6: A WORLD THAT WAS

Troy, Knossus, Mycenae, Sparta, Goumia, Therasia and Phaistos, were large prehistoric Aegean cities. Goumia had its foundries for the manufacture of bronze, Therasia its oil refineries and Phaistos its potteries. These factories were modem in every sense of the word except that there was no power-driven machinery. The houses of the poorest quarters of Goumia were substantially built and commodious, while literacy seems to have been almost universal among the Aegeans. Ur, Lagash and numerous other cities, especially those that flourished in northern Iraq, Anatolia and on the Western Plateau of Iran, were highly civilized prehistoric communities. Most of these cities we know only as the result of archeological excavations or as places mentioned in the Bible, Homer and other ancient literature.

Troy, Knossus and Mycenae we know from Greek legends, but all three of these cities have been explored by archeologists. Sparta became historical. Knossus on Crete has been the subject of much archeological exploration. Babylon (Sumeria, Na-Dingir-Ra) was inhabited in prehistoric times, as is testified by flint implements and other objects discovered there. The Akkadian story of creation states that the city was built “in the beginning of time,” a statement that may be closer to the truth than our archeologists and anthropologists are disposed to admit. Wedded to the Darwinian myth and armed with phoney time tables, they delight in dealing with astronomical figures when discussing the “antiquity of man.” The longer man has been on the earth the better for my present thesis, but I have doubts about the validity of these “time tables.” Whatever else may be true, we may rightly regard these peoples as having existed on the borderline between prehistory and history.

If, in like manner, we may think of the Achaeans, who were contemporaneous with the Myceanaens, as existing on the borderline between history and prehistory, we may think of them and their ways of life as affording us a dependable clue to the ways of life of prehistoric man. If Homer correctly reports the ideas and practices of the Achaeans of the time of the Trojan war, his descriptions of their ways of life and their ways of caring for the sick coincide closely with what we have pictured as flowing naturally from the instinctive demands of life.

They lived in houses in small communities and in larger cities, were active in the sun and air, were diligent in securing adequate rest and sleep, bathed regularly and often, understood the importance of emotional poise, fasted when ill, loved and cared for their children, and were hospitable. They had learned to eat animal foods and to make and drink wine. They indulged in games and seemed to have exercised much. As they wore few clothes, they received an abundance of sunshine directly on their bodies. So far as we can tell from Homer’s accounts, both they and their women were a hardy and robust people.

Homer speaks with much enthusiasm of the value of diet, exercise, games, hot and cold baths, fresh air, sunshine, music and song for the welfare both of the well and the sick. He favors hygiene and sanitation as preventives of disease and surgery in dealing with wounds; he favors dietetics and advises fasting, cleanliness and purity of body and mind. He distinguishes between healthful and unhealthful things and frequently refers to bathing as a means of purifying oneself, while the wives of his heroes are pictured as regularly preparing baths for them. He regards bathing as “refreshing” and as promoting recovery from fatigue. All of this is in striking contrast with his pictures of the employment of herbal poisons as charms.

Let us try to get a picture of the way of life of prehistoric man and early historic man, as the life of the latter was but a continuation of the life of the former. For history was not a new beginning. It is a continuation of prehistory and contains much of prehistory. There was no sudden break with the past when history dawned; the two periods represent a continuum. When man first came upon the stage of history, he had a long, unrecorded past, which he brought along with him into history. By studying man at the dawn of history we may learn much about man in prehistory. In our efforts to learn something of our prehistoric ancestors, we are not reduced to the necessity of relying on the wild guesses of those scientists who reconstruct whole cultures and the ways of life of forgotten peoples from a thigh bone, an arrow head and a fragment of pottery. Prehistory has left much more of itself than such reconstructions would imply. But we must approach such a study with a due degree of humility. The conscious superiority of modem man over our ancient ancestors, our colossal conceit that prompts us to treat these ancient peoples as children and our contempt for the “primitive mind,” leads us to regard ourselves as the true norm, the pattern of humanity. In our scoffing arrogance, we think of our deplorable deficiency as a measure of the vigor of our ancient prototypes. We mistake our accumulation of mechanical gadgets and technical know how for progress in mentality and in human value.

Let us commence with the Aegeans whose civilization was one of the oldest if not the oldest of which we have any knowledge. Apparently having originated on the island of Crete, it spread to all the Aegean islands and established colonies on the mainland of Greece and Asia Minor. As early as 3,000 B.C., the inhabitants of Crete made the transition from the Neolithic stage of culture to the age of metals and probably to the age of writing. Aegean women enjoyed complete equality with men. The Aegeans are specially noted for the fitness and exquisiteness of their art, their peaceful disposition and their freedom in experimentation. There seems to be no doubt that their civilization was the cornerstone of subsequent Achaean and Dorian civilizations. But they are prehistoric civilizations, hence they give us some idea of the dignity and triumphs of our prehistoric ancestors.

Remains of Neolithic and early metal-age cultures have been unearthed both in Hindustan and Deccan in India that are dated as early as 3,250 B.C., and which reached their peak about 2,800 to 2,500 B.C. This civilization covered an area in the Indus Valley about as large as Italy, perhaps larger. It was essentially an urban culture, with a cosmopolitan society, bustling enterprises and much trade with the outside. This early culture, which was definitely prehistoric, has a few facts to present to us about prehistoric man. This culture disappeared about 2,200 B.C. from causes that are only guessed at. The evidence points to the fact that women in this culture enjoyed almost equal freedom with men.

The Aegean and Achaean cultures and that of Vedic India were “primitive” for a long period. The cultures of Greece and the Aegean islands were all essentially the same and were “primitive” for a long period so that what the epic poems of Homer present us with is a primitive way of life among a people who regarded man as the most important creature in the universe and who refused to submit to the dictation of priests or despots and who refused to humble themselves before their gods. They thought of life as worth living for its own sake and because of their intellectual freedom, made greater progress in the arts and sciences than the other nations of antiquity.

In pursuing our studies of the life of prehistoric man, let us begin with the eating practices of these early cultures, as these are revealed in their agriculture and in their myths. The ancient legend, common to most old civilizations, as expressed in Genesis, where the gods are pictured as expelling mankind from the Garden of Delight, lest he put forth his hand and partake of the fruit of the Tree of Life and live forever, indicates the importance to life and health that was attached to man’s normal food. Its loss was tragic. Hesiod probably expresses a broader view when he says: “for the gods keep hidden from me the means of life.”

We naturally assume the first men were food gatherers. That they cultivated the soil or hunted and fished seems highly improbable. They gathered the produce of the trees and vines, perhaps also of herbs, eating them as they gathered them. It seems hardly likely that they stored foods from the outset. Indeed, if they lived in a climate far different from that which now prevails on the earth, there may have been no need for storing food. When, at some subsequent period, man learned to store food for later use, he could only have stored those foodstuffs, such as acorns and other nuts, grains, legumes, etc., that would keep for long periods. Certain fruits, such as the squash, pumpkin, apple, date, etc., may have been stored for short periods. Later when he had learned to dry fruits and vegetables and store them in this manner, he was able to keep them for longer periods. Our American Indians dried flesh to keep it for winter use. Certain tribes of California dried great quantities of grasshoppers and stored these for the winter.

Man’s period as a food-gatherer is supposed to have lasted through an enormous stretch of time before he learned to cultivate the soil, thus becoming a food-producer. Neolithic man was a food-producer, cultivating grains, fruits and vegetables and building elaborate irrigation systems. As a food-producer he had a more dependable source of food supply than he had as a food-gatherer. It is probable that man became a food producer far earlier than anthropologists think. We may get some clue, not only to the kinds of foods he produced during the prehistoric period, but also to the kinds of foods he ate at this time, by noticing his productions. That he had already become a flesh-eater at the time his agriculture blossomed is undoubted, but he does not seem to have made flesh foods the hub of his diet as do his modem descendants. The amount of flesh food eaten by various peoples varied according to circumstances, but plant foods seem to have predominated in the diet everywhere.

Let us dispose of flesh-eating first. Rarely did Greeks eat fish and other flesh. Indeed, in Homer, fish are considered inferior food. In general, among the Greeks, flesh was eaten only as a sacrifice. Homer pictures the Achaeans eating sacrificed flesh in great quantity and eating, not only the outer flesh, but the “inner parts” of the sacrificed animals. How often they sacrificed is not easy to guess, but sacrifices seem to have been frequent and to have amounted to veritable thanksgiving dinners, with the sacrificed flesh eaten apparently alone except for wine. If Homer is a good reporter, the Achaeans not only frequently sacrificed the thighs of bulls to their gods, eating the sacrificed flesh, but they were great drinkers of wine. Homer describes a feast given in the home of Menelaus, king of Sparta, some years after his return from Troy, in which tumblers “whirled through the midst” of the guests, while a minstrel sang and played the lyre. Neither the wine nor the tumblers nor the lyre could have been primitive, but the fact that the flesh-eating was so tied up with religion, not alone with the Greeks, but with the Egyptians, Israelites, and other ancient peoples, points to the possibility that flesh eating grew out of the system of magic.

The feasts described in Homer are those of the rulers and owning class and probably do not represent the eating habits of the mass of the population, who could not have had the abundance of wine and probably did not have the abundance of cattle that would have been required to indulge in such eating practices. It is noteworthy that the gods of the Greeks and Romans fed on nectar and ambrosia rather thhn upon flesh. Man has, at times, eaten angel's food, but the Greeks were the only people who fed their gods on such foods. These foods of the gods did not allow for much variety nor did they permit the complicated mixtures, such as are seen on the tables, even of the poor, in America today. Simplicity characterized their meals as it did those of the Greeks themselves. Indeed, their feasts, as described by Homer, were models of simplicity in contrast with modem everyday meals.

Flesh eating among the Aegeans, Egyptians, Greeks, Semitic peoples, Indo-Aryans of the Vedic period and other peoples of antiquity was so mixed and mingled with their religious ceremonials as to suggest that flesh eating may have had its origin in magic. The offering of sacrifices, more often than otherwise, animal, sacrifices was a prominent feature in most ancient religions. Commonly the sacrificed animal was eaten and this sacrificial flesh seems to have constituted the greater part, if not the whole, of the flesh diet of these peoples. The Indo-Aryans burned the sacrificial animal on the altar and ate the flesh thereof. Among the Chinese, on the other hand, animal sacrifices seem to have been rare, although hunting and herding contributed to the family food supply. The flesh of the dog and hog (pork) were very popular items of diet among the early Chinese. They had domesticated the dog, hog, sheep, ox, horse, chicken, water buffalo, monkey and, probably, the elephant.

Cannibalism, often practiced by many peoples, including the Aztecs of Mexico, was almost always part of a religious ceremonial. If we are to class the eating of the testicles of dead enemy soldiers as cannibalism, we must also class blood transfusing as cannibalism. Cannibalism is a variety of flesh eating that certainly could have formed no part of the primate diet. Greek mythology strongly suggests that the prehistoric Greeks practiced cannibalism. Indeed few races and tribes have escaped it during the course of their history, but we have no justification for supposing that cannibalism was ever a universal practice among mankind or that it was ever anything more than a sporadic practice in most tribes. Certain tribes of Indians inhabiting the coastal area of Texas ate human flesh as a regular article of diet, but they were regarded as degraded specimens by all their neighbors.

Cereals seem to have been among the first plants man cultivated when he developed agriculture. But they were by no means the whole of his agricultural output. Neolithic man raised vegetables and numerous fruits. In the New World, Native Americans, in a somewhat primitive state, raised maize (com), beans, squash, pumpkins, both sweet and “Irish” potatoes, tomatoes and a variety of other vegetables. Perhaps we do not go far astray if we assume that, when man began to raise fruits and vegetables, he cultivated those foods that he had previously been accustomed to eating. It may not be amiss to assume, also, that he raised cereals, at first at least, as food for his domesticated animals.

Anthropologists say that the exact spot where agriculture originated is unknown, but they point out that among the first products he cultivated were cereals. Neolithic man was a food-producer, cultivating millet, vegetables and numerous fruits. Flax was cultivated in the Old World for its textile fiber. In the New World, maize was almost the only cereal crop, but numerous other food-plants were cultivated. Nuts, berries, acorns, and various wild fruits were gathered by the Amerinds.

The Egyptian economy rested upon agriculture, which was highly diversified, the soil yielding excellent crops of wheat, barley, millet, vegetables and fruits of various kinds, flax and cotton. The Sumerians were excellent farmers raising amazing crops of cereals and sub-tropical fruits. The Aegeans cultivated numbers of fruits, including the olive from which they extracted the oil, vegetables and grains. The diet of the Greeks and Romans was largely grain foods. The common people of the ancient Romans subsisted chiefly on unleavened bread dipped in milk, this supplemented with onions, peas and turnips. Only those near the sea had fish and only farmers had flesh, consisting chiefly of goat, pork and lamb. In the first century B.C. such oriental fruits as cherries, peaches, and apricots were introduced into the Roman diet. In the early Vedic period the Indo-Aryans raised barley, vegetables and fruits and ploughed their land with wooden ploughs drawn by oxen. The principal crops of the ancient Chinese, who have always been primarily a nation of farmers, were wheat, millet, rice and vegetables. Agriculture, herding and cattle stealing were the chief occupations of the Achaeans; even the Greek kings farmed for a living. The early Romans were also agriculturists. As the institutions of a people in their prime are generally but modifications of forms which have survived from their early days, so the agricultural pursuits of a people at the dawn of their history are but survivals of similar activities in their prehistory.

Diodorus Siculus wrote that “the whole manner of life in Egypt is so evenly ordered that it would appear as though it had been arranged according to the rules of health by a learned physician, rather than by a lawgiver.” The only fault I find with this statement is the implication that “learned physicians” were ever capable of ordering the whole manner of life according to the rules of health. Never in all of their history have physicians studied the rules of health. Disease is their specialty, cures their stock-in-trade. The lawgivers have never been physicians and it was the lawgivers who ordered the lives of the peoples of the past.

The fact is that man’s life has never been chaotic, but has always been well-ordered, vacillating around the instinctive norms of behavior and at all times ordered in a way to supply the basic needs of living. Whatever of disorder has been seen has resulted from the introduction, largely by the shaman, the priest, the physician, and the trader (using the term trader in a very b$oad and inclusive sense), into man’s life, of adventitious and foreign elements. Modem life is probably more chaotic than man’s life has been at any previous period of his existence.

The ancient Egyptians objected to formal exercise, saying that if this is needed there is something wrong with the way of life. Perhaps they still remembered the active life of their prehistoric forebears. Formal exercise is needful only where the life of a people fails to provide the requisite all-round exercise. Calisthenics, gymnastics, weight training, etc., are substitutes for the normal ways of life that were followed by man at an earlier period.

The Aegeans were devoted to gymnastics and athletics, delighting in sports and games of every description-chess, dancing, boxing and running matches rivaling each other for popular attention. Archeological discoveries at Cnossus reveal that the people of Crete had a well developed system of gymnastics and that exercise and bathing formed a part of their daily life. I must remind my readers that this was in the prehistoric period and that it was long before there was a physician in the world, hence the gymnastic life of these people could not have grown out of medicine. Aegean women enjoyed complete equality with men and took part in the games and other athletic activities.

Among the Indians of the Indus-valley civilization in the Vedic age, singing, dancing, feasting, carousing and feats of strength were typical features of a society that was vigorous and uninhibited. Here, also, women enjoyed an almost equal freedom with men.

Among the Achaeans, as among the later Greeks, athletics, gymnastics and other forms of exercise held a prominent place in the lives of the people, women indulging almost as freely as men. Women certainly held a more exalted position in prehistory and in the earlier centuries of Pagan civilization than she held in later ages in Europe and in America until quite recently and a much higher position than she holds in so-called primitive tribes of the living present. Indeed, distinguished women played a greater part in human history in the remote past than they do today and outstanding women were deified. How modem in all respects were the responses of those intelligent, integrated, thoughtful, gay, giddy and unpredictable women of Homer—Helen, Penelope, Nausicus, Chryseis, Briseis, Hecuba, Andromache, Iocasta and others! They did not behave like repressed and enslaved females!

I have stressed the physical activities of men. It is important that we stress the activities of women. Achaean girls and women led free, natural and largely open-air lives and there is much evidence that they were athletic, even often trained for special athletic work. We may begin with a consideration of the Greek myth of Atalanta, who was not only a great huntress, but a great athlete. She wrestled with and defeated no less a hero than young Pelus, who later became the father of Achilles, and she was so fleet of foot that no man could outrun her. Her ultimate defeat, in a race with a man, was achieved, not by the fleetness of her competitor, but by trickery. I think that we may safely say with Professor Chas. Seltman, Litt. D., of Cambridge, that the telling and re-telling of this story, which was so popular in Greece, was done because Atalanta was a symbol of an aspect of ancient Greek life. She lived before the Trojan war and her legend must be interpreted to mean that there were female athletes at the time who were outstanding in their accomplishments. Professor Seltman says in his Women of Antiquity, that a people “only evolve, embroider, and recite legends about an imaginary athlete heroine because their civilization affords some scope for young females to be athletes. No medieval maiden ever stripped to wrestle with a troubadour; no virgin martyr ever raced in the Hippodrome against a saintly deacon; no houri ever left a harem to hunt wild boar on foot. The answer is ‘No scope, no legend.’ But where there is a legend there is, somewhere, scope.”

Without degrading Atalanta to the status of a mere imaginary athlete, I suggest that the existence and popularity of the legends about her are memories of a time when women athletes were more common, perhaps, than they were in classical Greece. We know that at a much later time at Olympia, the greatest athletic center of the ancient world, provisions were made for athletic contests between women and girls. Although historians have built for us a myth (a false one) that Athenian women were secluded like Oriental women, sculptured scenes of Athenian girls swimming indicate that they did indulge in athletic pastimes. They are known to have attended dancing schools and were trained by dancing teachers, especially in a kind of ballet dancing. Nudity among them was more common in Athens than our foolish historians have permitted us to know. Wives and daughters did not lead the secluded lives we have so long been told they did. Hetairae wore their hair long—were free women; slave women, like female industrial slaves of our era, wore short hair.

We know that children in Egypt went naked, played naked in the streets and attended the schools in a state of nudity, while Egyptian women wore transparent garments that failed to hide their bodies. In Sparta small children usually ran naked in the sun and air; girls had their own way, enjoying the same youthful freedom within the social frame-work as did the boys. Plutarch tells us that custom decreed that

Spartan girls should exercise themselves in races, wrestling, throwing the quoit, casting the javelin and that they appeared naked in the processions and choral dances in the presence of young men, yet he tells us that there was no wantonness in their nakedness. It was simply part of their way of life and was part of their health program. Their bodies were tanned and healthy. ,

In his Republic, Plato indicates that, not only the Spartans, but the Cretans exercised in the nude. It would seem that he is referring to women exercising naked, for he has Socrates discussing the subject of women exercising in the nude in the gymnasium, a thing that the men of Athens had long done. The Greek colonies (chiefly Achaean Greeks), as well as the Etruscans of Italy, seem to have been more Sparta-like in their way of life than the other Greeks of the mainland. Of the Etruscans we are told by Athenaeus, that “the women take very great care of their bodies and often exercise nude with the men.” It is significant that the beauty of Tuscan women was renowned. The athletic co-education of the Spartans, which was famous, was also carried out on the large island of Chios, where Athenaeus says: “It is delightful just to walk to the gymnasia and running tracks to see the young men wrestling with the young girls, who are also naked.” It was not until the triumph of Christianity (a Christianity that rejected the doctrines of Jesus) that cleanliness and nakedness began to be regarded as repulsive and indecent.

Discussing nudity and the mingling of the sexes in the nude naturally brings us to the subject of sex. Many anthropologists struggle valiantly to provide a primitive promiscuity for man and eagerly seize upon the slightest shred of “evidence” that may be, by the most torturous interpretations, made to support this thesis. Nowhere in the entire animal kingdom is it possible to find a promiscuity as absolute and uninhibited as they paint for our primitive ancestors. Primitive men cared less for their mates, in the view of these anthropologists, than do the male anthropoids, and freely permitted access to them by any male whose urges and fancies turned in the direction of a man’s mate. No male anthropoid permits another male to approach his female without a fight. I am inclined to the view that, with these anthropologists, most of whom advocate a revival of promiscuity, the wish is father to the thought.

In the Heroic Age of Greece, monogamy was the universal practice, although extra marital relations were not frowned upon by either party. There is strong evidence that the Achaean Greeks were not acquainted with homosexuality. Prostitution, we know, had its origin in religion, which means that it evolved rather late in man’s history. At a much later date, prostitution and homosexuality were absent in Sparta, although the demand for marital fidelity was rather weak.

Not only did our forefathers sleep, perhaps even more than we do, but they had definite ideas about the value of sleep. The recuperative office of rest and sleep receives strong emphasis in the Homeric poems. Homer stresses the office of sleep in relieving pain and fatigue: “Athena shed sleep upon his eyes, that it might enfold his lids and speedily free him from the toilsome weariness;” “Athena cast sweet sleep upon her eyelids” to relieve her from every fatigue, worry, distress and pain. He speaks of “much enduring godly Odysseus from his many toils in sleep resting and recovering from his weariness.” Again, “when sleep seized him, loosening the cares of his heart, being shed in sweetness round about him, for sore weary were his glorious limbs.” To quote all that Homer has to say about the restorative office of sleep would be to unduly prolong this chapter. This will suffice to reveal that its wholesome and recuperative character was well understood.

Temperance was taught by the religious leaders and philosophers long before there was even the rudiments of a medical profession. Exhortations to temperance are numerous in the Bible. A Magian maxim says: “Temperance is the strength of the mind; man is dead in the intoxication of wine; man is not in safety, except under the buckler of wisdom.” The Greeks were not teetotalers, but they did manage to follow more or less their rule of “moderation in all things,” while, contrasted with us, they had few poison-vices.

There are many indications in the most ancient literature that has survived that man, at a very remote period, understood the importance of the emotions; that he had some understanding of the evil effects of certain emotions and of the wholesome effects of other emotions. Many passages in the Bible admonishing the reader to “be of good cheer” and to “have courage” and the passage that states that “he will bring down my gray hair in sorrow unto the grave,” are but a few of the indications of this understanding that are contained in the Bible. Of similar import are many statements in Homer. For example, the Odyssey admonishes “be joyful, merry and happy.” On the opposite side of the picture is Homer’s statement: “That thou mayest not mar thy flesh with weeping,” which indicates that it was understood, even before the dawn of history, that grief was physically destructive. Again, he records: “On her fell a cloud of soul-consuming grief, and she had no more heart to sit upon one of the many seats that were in the room, but down upon the threshold of her fair-wrought chamber she sank moaning piteously,” and, again, “her knees were loosened where she sat and her heart melted; for a long time she was speechless and both her eyes were filled with tears, and the flow of her voice was checked.”

Homer indicates that anger, worry, grief, fear, sorrow, bitterness, jealousy, excitement and passions harmfully affect the body and mind of man; while rest, sleep, exercise, games, humor, happiness, music, song and dancing are the best divergents for the distressed and unfortunate, greatly helping to maintain and to restore mental and physical well-being.

The office of games and sports in elevating the spirits of men is well depicted in the Odyssey, where he say's: “Try thy skill in the sports, if happily thou art practiced in any; and thou art like to have knowledge of games, for there is no greater glory for a man while yet he lives than that which he achieves by hands and feet. Come, then, make assay, and cast away care from thy soul.” He recounts that Chiron subdued the wrath of Achilles with music and that Orpheus kept peace and elevated the depressed spirits of the Argonauts by his songs and poetry. Of the use of song in cheering the spirit of man he says: “This was the song the famous minstrel sang; and Odysseus listened and was glad of heart, and so likewise were the others.” Of the use of the dance for the same purpose, he recounts that “Odysseus gazed at the twinkling of the feet, and marveled in spirit.”

We have previously seen that fasting is an instinctive practice in acute illness and in cases of serious injury. Homer’s frequent references to fasting indicate that the practice was well known among the Achaean Greeks in the immediate prehistoric period. There are numerous references to fasting in the Bible, although the only reference to it in sickness (that of Jesus telling his disciples that “this kind cometh not out save by prayer and fasting”) seems to be a spurious passage. Its interpolation at a later date does indicate that fasting was employed in what appears to have been chronic disease.

Homer frequently pictures fasting as being carried out by both men and women in states of great grief. Thus Achilles fasted after the death of his close friend at Troy. Penelope fasted when she was worried over the safety of her son, Telemachus, whose life was endangered by her suitors. In states of great grief and in other profound emotional states, there is both absence of desire for food and a lack of the physiological conditions requisite to the digestion of food. That the Achaeans abstained from eating under such conditions reveals that they were not afraid to miss a few meals and that they were guided by their instincts and not by science. At a later date, it is recorded of Alexander the Great that he abstained from food and sleep for three days and nights, so great was his remorse over the stabbing, by his own hands, of his friend Clitus.

Homer recounts the fast of Penelope when she was worried over the safety of Telemachus: “She lay there fasting, and tasting neither meat nor drink, musing whether her son should escape death. So deep was she musing that when deep sleep came over her and she sank in slumber, all her joints were loosened.” Physicians, who know nothing of fasting, can talk learnedly about this passage indicating that she was in a coma and that her joints were paralyzed as a result of fasting. Homer certainly knew better. Certain medical authors have attempted to show, by such statements in Homer, that he knew that when death takes one dear to us and we are overcome with grief, we cannot afford to neglect to eat, lest we pay in impaired health. But Homer here attributes the “loosening” of the joints, not to abstinence, but to “musing.” By loosened joints, a phrase which he uses of warriors stricken in battle, he may mean the same as “loosened him his limbs,” a phrase which seems to mean that the limbs crumbled under the man smitten through the head or whose head had been cleaved from his body. This takes place in the limbs of one who is asleep, even if he has been eating regularly.

That the early Greeks were acquainted with death from lack of food is also evidenced by Homer’s remark that “to die by famine is the most wretched way to encounter one’s doom; truly every shape of death is hateful to mortals, but to die by hunger is the most pitiful of all.” Here he speaks of famine instead of fasting; this means that he is speaking of death from food inadequacy rather than from total abstinence. At this point it is necessary to emphasize the fact that death from total abstinence comes, not in the fasting period, but after the fasting period has ended and the period of starvation has begun.

As medical men make no distinction between fasting (a term meaning to withhold oneself from food) and starving (a term meaning dying), and thus confuse themselves and everybody else, it is necessary to enter into a brief explanation of the two processes. In a previous chapter it was pointed out that the fasting animal subsists upon stored food reserves contained within its own tissues. So long as these stored reserves are adequate to meet the needs of life of the animal under the circumstances, it is fasting. So long as these reserves are adequate, no injury can come to the functioning tissues of the body. Once the reserves are exhausted, if the abstinence continues, functioning tissues begin to break down. The animal is now in the process of starving—dying. It is no longer fasting.

Except in otherwise fatal cases, the end of the fasting period is marked by the return of hunger, so that food is insistently demanded and will be taken if it is available. In hopeless cases, such as cancer, serious and advanced heart disease, late tuberculosis, advanced diabetes, etc., there will be no return of hunger, for the reason that there is no power to digest food if it is taken.

Medical men do not hesitate to put ideas into Homer’s head and to make him mean what he could not have meant. He was certainly not acquainted with modem medical theories and the attempt to put modem medical fallacies into his head is a form of dishonesty. Because, in the Odyssey, he has one of his characters say: “Nay, come, there is yet food and drink in our swift ships, let us bethink of food, that we pine not with hunger,” they assert that Homer emphasizes that hunger may cause serious damages and complications in the body. When he says “to die by famine is the most wretched way to encounter one’s doom,” he is not speaking of fasting, but of the slow process of dying from food deficiencies.

Cleanliness is one of the baste elements of hygiene. A knowledge of the importance of cleanliness has been in mankind’s possession since long before the dawn of history, if not from the beginning of human life on the earth. We know that man has frequently incorporated his strongest convictions in his religions and these religions have preserved for us many of the earliest practices of the race. Religion has rarely been a creator; more often it has preserved, at the same time that it has tried to fortify a practice with divine sanction or by direct command of the deity. When cleanliness and more or less sound rules of eating were part and parcel of a religion of a people, it will be found, upon investigation, that these inclusions in the religious way of life have been handed down from antiquity, from prehistoric times in most cases. Something of this nature must have been in the mind of Zoroaster when he declared that the laws of the magians were from the beginning. Certainly the religion that he systematized was much older than his time.

A number of ancient law-givers and religious leaders ranked cleanliness among the religious virtues and its neglect among the sins, thus demonstrating that knowledge of the value of cleanliness and of the evils of uncleanliness was possessed by prehistoric man. The devotees of the ancient magian religion, which preceded by centuries, the first physician, were required to “avoid all pollution,” to “bathe often,” and to “be frugal.” Zoroaster, who systematized but did not originate this religion, said that the laws of the magians were from the beginning and were observed in heaven. Chaldean prayers and hymns are interspersed with ritualistic conceptions of cleanliness and uncleanliness. Evidence that much that is recorded in the Bible is far older than Moses, indicates we are reading poems and orally transmitted history and philosophy from a much earlier period, some of it going back to the stone age. The great emphasis that is there placed upon personal and community cleanliness contrasts strongly with the disparagement of personal cleanliness and the almost total neglect of community hygiene that characterized the Medieval and Modem world until a little over a century ago. The Hebrews also laid great stress on washing the hands before meals. Personal and community cleanliness was stressed among the Mohammedans and it is noteworthy that these cleanly people escaped the plagues that ravaged filthy Europe during the Dark Ages and for a long time thereafter.

It is stated that the first traces of bathing are found among the Egyptians of 3,500 years ago; that they had devised a bathtub at that time, but it is likely that bathing had its origin centuries before the first traces of it were left in the archeological remains of the ancient Egyptians The first bathing was probably done by our primitive ancestors, as among modem savages, in streams, lakes, pools and the sea; even the first shower baths were taken in the rain.

The cleanliness of the Egyptian is notable. Everything putrid and everything that had a tendency to putrefy was carefully avoided by them from the remotest time, and so strict were their priests on this point that they wore no garments made of any animal substance; they shaved their whole bodies, even to their eyebrows, lest they should unknowingly harbor any filth, excrement or vermin, which they thought arose from putrefaction (spontaneous generation), and it is thought that the rite of circumcision arose out of this same effort to avoid putrefaction. The Greeks also shaved their bodies for the sake of cleanliness. ,

Archeological excavations at Knossus on Crete have revealed baths and drainage systems that are thought by some to be older than the civilization of Egypt and Babylon. The Aegeopelagitic civilization had a well-developed system of gymnastics, and exercise and baths formed a part of everyday life. Under the palace at Knossus was unearthed a fully equipped sanitary bathroom and water closet. Nearly all the basic principles of modem sanitary engineering were known to the designers of the palace of Knossus. Minoan (Aegean) civilization had already disappeared when Homer (about 1,000 B.C.) sang of its glories and terribleness.

In the highly advanced civilization in Vedic India, in the Indus Valley, which passed away about 2,000 B.C., private homes were built of brick and equipped with bathrooms which drained into sewer pipes and ran underneath the principle streets and drained into the river.

Baths in Homer were both hot and cold and were taken in springs and streams as well as in the ocean. There were fresh water and salt or sea water baths and there was anointing with oil. Homer tells of Aphrodite of Paphos being “bathed and anointed by the Greeks who used imperishable, immortal oil.” Sea bathing was often a ceremonial cleansing, as when Atreded bade the fold purify themselves; “so they purified themselves and cast their defilement into the sea.” He frequently referred to bathing as a means of purifying (cleansing oneself) and as being refreshing and as promoting quick recovery from fatigue. The wives of his heroes are pictured frequently preparing baths for their husbands, while he mentions both cold and hot bathing, bathing in the sea and river as well as in the bath tub.

A practice among the Achaeans that must have helped to popularize bathing was that of the daughter of a host bathing the young men as guests. “Fair Polycaste, the younger daughter of Nestor, son of Meleus,” bathed Telemachus, “son of Odysseus, and anointed him with oil, and cast about him a goodly mantle and a doublet, and he came forth from the bath in fashion like the deathless gods.” In the home of Menelaus, also, Telemachus, together with Thrasymedeus, “splendid son of Nestor,” were bathed by the maidens, who also anointed them with oil and put thick clothes and doublets upon them.

Bathing plays a role in Homer Almost equal to that of food: “...so then at evening they bathed in the river and were refreshed.” The stress placed upon cleanliness in Homer indicates the importance it assumed in the minds of prehistoric man. The frequency with which the baths were taken in the rivers and in the sea indicates that man did not await the invention of the bathtub and plumbing to bathe. Homer describes wounds being cleansed with hot water, a striking contrast with the practice of physicians and surgeons of the Middle Ages, who poured boiling oil into wounds.

In the Odyssey we see the Achaeans washing their hands before eating with as much regularity as ever the Israelites washed their hands before meals. Although China got a late start in civilization, the sagacious comment, “work done with dirty hands is worthless,” found carved upon the wall of a sacred Chinese temple of 1,000 B.C., indicates that the Hebrews were not alone in demanding cleanliness of the hands.

At a later date the Romans placed great stress upon personal and community cleanliness, and established great public baths throughout the empire. These were not the work of any medical profession, but preceded the introduction of medicine among the Romans. Their cleanliness was primitive and not a medically fostered practice. Katherine B. Shippen says in her Men of Medicine: “Though the intelligent Romans thought very little of the practice of medicine, they set great store by the preservation and safeguarding of public health. The enormous public baths were crowded with patrons. The baths of Caracalla could accommodate sixteen hundred people at one time, and the baths of Diocletian had room for three thousand. Here there were steam rooms, and rooms for massaging, pools of tepid water and cool water, and hot baths and cold baths. Great baths like these were built and patronized everywhere throughout the Roman Empire.”

These baths were not built by nor under the supervision of physicians, nor upon the advice of physicians, for Rome had no physicians at the time the baths were first built. Miss Shippen tries to find “some herb doctors” “for no people has been able to get along without some kind of medical practitioners,” she naively says. Her “herb doctors” “went through the country, treating people with decoctions of their herbs and with their incantations and amulets.” Not only does she picture to us nothing more significant than magicians and magic practices, but she gets the decoctions out of their proper historic setting. The Romans practiced cleanliness, were careful of their dietary practices, and were athletic. Largely vegetarian in practice, forced by necessity to be frugal in their eating habits, eating simple fare, they maintained health in the only way that it can be maintained.

I must stress, in this connection, that knowledge of the value of cleanliness and of the evils of uncleanliness long antedates the origin of the medical profession. I think it noteworthy that during the Dark Ages, when the priestcraft discouraged cleanliness and the people were steeped in filth, the medical profession did not raise any protest against the uncleanliness that everywhere prevailed, but on the contrary, when a revival of cleanliness began, opposed it on the absurd ground that cleanliness will produce disease. Modem physicians gave no attention to cleanliness until Pasteur, scared the wits out of them with his germs and. even now, following in the footsteps of Lord Lister, they prefer chemical sterility to cleanliness. Both Semmelweis and Holmes accused them of killing mothers with their unclean hands. They drove the first to insanity and death, and retired the second. The second was an avid reader of hygienic and hydropathic literature and probably derived his inspiration from these sources: it is possible that the first was a reader of hydropathic literature.

Until a city population learns how to render their city sanitary, the people must suffer much from the befoulment of their environment. Moses provided the Israelites with a means of keeping their campsites clean, perhaps in order that they would not be forced to move so often, but the method employed would not sen e the needs of a town or city. In these, some very efficient sanitary systems must be employed, else the city becomes so foul as to be uninhabitable. Archeologists credit man with having '‘discovered" sanitary requirements in Neolithic times. Although he must have discovered such requirements very early, some of the ancient cities, like Babylon, were very insanitary.

The practice of community hygiene, so far as its employment in civilized communities is concerned, goes back to prehistoric ages to Aegean or Cretan and Vedic Indian times. It was practiced by ancient Egyptian and Assyrian cities. The baths and water closets of Crete have already been noted, as have also the bath rooms which drained into sewer pipes that ran underneath the principal streets and drained into the river, that existed in the Indus Valley civilization in India in Vedic times. All of this high development of sanitary means occurred long before there was a medical profession. It was not an invention of the medical profession and it was not a function of medical men to attend it.

Community sanitation, perhaps, attained its highest level, at least so far as mechanical contrivances are concerned, in the Roman Empire. The Roman systems of sanitation, like that of their

predecessors on the stage of history, were not works of physicians. There is no history of a single country of the past in which the hygienic and sanitary systems originated with physicians. Sanitation or community hygiene, which was provided for by many of the ancient law-givers, antedates by centuries the origin of medicine. Long after the medical profession came into being, community hygiene was in the hands of the city fathers and the priestcraft and was ignored by the physicians, who took no interest in sanitation.

Miss Shippen says that “The Roman sewer systems were even more ambitious than were the baths. The Cloaca Maxima, the biggest of the Roman sewers, which was built in the sixth century B.C., was so tremendous that it was said a load of hay could be driven through it. And the sewer was copied in many other places throughout the Roman Empire. There was running water even in the smaller towns. Archeologists, digging up the ruins of those towns, were astonished to find water closets with running water (water closets were not known in Europe until at least a thousand years after Roman times.)”

It will be noted that the largest of these sewers was built at least two hundred years before there was a medical profession and a much longer time before the first physician reached Rome. This splendid sanitary system was not the creation of any medical profession. Miss Shippen, herself, testifies to the fact that this was not a part of any program designed by physicians, when she adds: “But public health and sanitation are not medicine. There were no doctors (she means physicians) of any note in Rome until Galen started to practice in Pergamum in Asia Minor. This was the second century A.D.,” or nearly eight hundred years after the construction of Cloaca Maxima. She records the fact that Europe had no running water and water closets, she neglects to add that there were no sewers in Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire, until at least a thousand years later. She also neglects to add that it was the break down of hygiene and sanitation in Europe that resulted in the numerous plagues that were responsible for such high death rates in Europe during the thousand years reign of anti-naturalism that soon followed. Lastly, she fails to record the fact that the re-establishment of sanitation in Europe was done by laymen and not by physicians, that, indeed, it was opposed by physicians. She writes propaganda, not history, hence she carefully chose to omit much that could have been said.

I think it noteworthy that during the Dark Ages, when the priestcraft discouraged cleanliness and the people were steeped in filth, the medicine men did not raise any protest against the uncleanness that everywhere prevailed, but, on the contrary, when a revival of cleanliness began, large numbers of them opposed on the absurd theory that cleanliness will produce disease. It is not without significance that there is a large body of physicians today who hold that sanitation and hygiene have rendered us less resistant to polio virus. Today there are few physicians who will admit that hygiene and sanitation eliminated the plagues of the Middle Ages, but insist that these were eliminated by vaccination, although they developed no vaccine other than smallpox vaccine. There is a mountain of evidence that vaccination does not prevent smallpox and is no substitute for sanitation and hygiene.

In modem civilization, with its emphasis on “mechanical principles and technical potentialities rather than on organic development within the total natural environment,” an almost fatal breach with nature has been made. Our giant cities and even our smaller ones would become uninhabitable within a very brief time, except for efficient sanitary systems. That man can exist amid great filth is demonstrated by those Eastern populations that do it, but he lives a precarious existence and endures much suffering that could be avoided by simple cleanliness.

Although Thucydides, who was a historian and not a physician, was the first to write about “infection, resistance and immunity,” the idea that certain diseases are contagious or infectious is a very ancient one, its very origin being lost in the mists of antiquity. How did man come to think that disease could be caught or could be transferred from one person to another by contact or by proximity? How soon after he had acquired this idea did he leam to isolate patients suffering with these diseases? How early did he attempt to fumigate and disinfect his surroundings in an effort to avoid these diseases? These are questions that, for the moment at least,' are unanswerable. We may pass them by and consider the evidence that these ideas and practices had their origin in prehistory, perhaps as part of the system of magic.

Homer thus describes the use of brimstone in what is certainly a practice of fumigation: “Bring the necessary sulphur, old nurse, that cleanses all pollution, and bring me fire, that I may purify the house with sulphur.” “Fire was brought and brimstone, and Ulysses thoroughly purged the women’s chamber and the great hall and the court.” It seems clear, from this, that the practice of fumigation reaches back into prehistory. It took mankind a long time to abandon the folly. Have we yet learned that cleanliness is the genuine safeguard of health? (The ancient practice of building huge fires in the streets and market places of the cities, during an epidemic, seems to have been an effort to fumigate the city—perhaps to make it hot for the evil spirits.) Ovid, in his magnificent collection of Greco-Roman myths, The Metamorphoses, pictures the act of purification with burning brimstone as a magic rite. He has Medea purge the flesh of Aeson, father of Jason, with smoldering sulphur.

In this connection it is interesting to note that Moses also advised the isolation of certain types of patients, enjoined frequent bathing and strict cleanliness in these and other cases of illness, and often advised the tearing down of the house in which the sick had been sheltered or the complete renovation of the walls of the house, indicating that the Hebrews had ideas similar to those of the Greeks. Could they have brought these ideas with them from Egypt? Or, if the thesis is correct that the Old Testament was compiled after the return of the Hebrews from their Babylonian captivity, did they derive the idea from the Babylonians? Perhaps these practices were general in the near East and in the civilized West at the time.

There does not seem to be any way to fit these ideas and practices within the framework of the demonology that long prevailed; nor can they be fitted into the older idea that it is god who sends sickness. If the idea that diseases are “catching” is as old as these practices indicate, it would be interesting to know just what it was that the people thought was “caught.” It was more than a thousand years after Homer wrote that the belief arose that disease is caused by minute animals (animalcules) that are too small to be seen by the unaided eye and that float in the air. Varro, one of our standard sources of knowledge of the past, wrote: “Small creatures, invisible to the eye, fill the atmosphere in marshy localities, and with the air breathed through the nose and mouth penetrate into the human body, thereby causing dangerous diseases.” While the germ theory, of which this was the beginning, is at least two thousand years old, it did not arise in prehistory nor in early history. If we cannot fit cleansing and fumigating practices into the various theories of etiology that prevailed at the time and later, we must at least think that they had some idea of what they meant by “contamination” and “pollution.”

Ulysses is described by Homer as purifying his hands by washing them in strong wine. As this could have been no reference to the employment of alcohol in destroying germs, it was probably a ceremonial “purification” in which Ulysses indulged. The Greek tribal leaders, of whom Ulysses was one, must have been medicine-men, a circumstance that fits in very well with the fact that the state was set up by the priestcraft. Certain medical writers have attempted to make the washing of his hands by Ulysses into an antiseptic practice, but Ulysses could hardly have known anything of germs and sepsis. The practice was probably a religious or magical rite. We must always avoid the tendency to read modem meanings into ancient practices and into ancient records. Wine was frequently employed in a wide variety of magical and religious ceremonials and there are religious orders and sects yet in existence that defend its use as a drink on religious grounds. There are also religious orders that manufacture wine and enjoy a sizable income from its sale.

That wine was later employed by the leeches as medicine and that its employment as such is still advocated by both physicians and certain religious groups attests to the hold it has on the imaginations of men. The Hebrews thought that “wine itself makes the life glad.” (Eccl. 10:19). They thought of it as also making the heart of God glad. Wine drinking was almost universal in ancient times, people often mixing it with spices and drugs to make it more “heady.” In Numbers 28:7 we find a stronger alcoholic being used as a “drink offering” to Jehovah. In the New Testament Paul advises Timothy to drink water no longer, but to take wine for his stomach’s sake. By this time, wine had become a medicine.

The employment of wine today as a “powerful germ killer” is defended by medical men. The New York Times (April 4, 1959) carried the statement that “The French Committee of Studies on Alcoholism reported that wine is a powerful germ killer whose action in comparable with that of penicillin.” What they seem to have neglected to add is that “powerful germ killers” are such because they are virulent poisons and that they also kill men. Penicillin (an antibiotic) kills germs and patients.

Salvatore P. Lucia, M.D., professor of medicine in the California School of Medicine, says in his book, Wine as Food and Medicine: “Wine is the most ancient dietary beverage and the most important medicinal agent in continuous use throughout the history of mankind ... Actually few other substances available to man have been as widely recommended for their curative powers as have wines.” Again: “Wine is widely used in the treatment of diseases of the digestive system. It is found to be particularly beneficial in anorexia, hypochlorydia without gastritis and hyposthenic dyspepsia. Minor hepatic insufficiency responds not unfavorably to unadulterated dry white table wine. The tannin content and mildly antiseptic properties of wine make it valuable in the treatment of intestinal colic, mucus colitis, spastic constipation, diarrhea and many infectious diseases of the gastro-intestinal tract.” Thus we see the glories of wine still being sung by the poisoning school of medicine.

As religion and medicine both grew out of the ancient system of magic, it is not surprising that both systems still employ and defend the employment of wine. The facts that Jesus drank wine and that he is reported to have turned water into wine at the feast of Cana are often cited as evidences that wine, if not taken in “excess,” is a wholesome substance. One religious group says: “Knowing what medical science has discovered about wine, we can understand how Timothy’s stomach condition could be materially improved by the use of ⁴a little wine.’ An excess, an immoderate quantity, however, would injure the stomach.” Both these branches of the ancient system of deception are still humbugging the people. The lies of medical science continue to be employed by religionists to defend their continued indulgence in the ancient rite.

The closeness of Lucia to the wineries of California, certain of which belong to the Benedictine order, which manufactures and derives a large income from the sale of Benedictine wine, his name, which hints that he is a member of the same church, and the fact that he is a medical man, all combine to cause us to suspect that something more tangible than a mere belief in the wholesomeness of the decay of grapes motivated his efforts in writing his book. Medical men are all committed to the absurdity that poisons are the proper things with which to treat the sick and alcohol has long been one of their favorite poisons.

Chapter 7: WESTWARD FROM EDEN

The discovery of America in 1492 introduced the European world to a large segment of the Mongoloid branch of the human family. Most of these people, whom we erroneously call Indians, were living in rude savagery, but certain of them had attained an advanced stage of civilization. I shall make no effort to consider in great detail the practices and ways of life of all of the Native American tribes, but shall content myself with a brief discussion of a few of the practices that seem to have been more or less general.

The ruder tribes lived a communistic way of life, remnants of which persisted in the regulations of the highly civilized nations. A white man once advised an Indian to practice economy by saving superfluous food against the scarcity of winter. “Will I let my brother suffer when I have plenty,” asked the Indian. Whatever the Indian had he cheerfully bestowed upon the needy of his tribe. There was no private ownership of land and, as a rule, land was worked socially.

They were a healthy people, noted for their strength and endurance. In his History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Natchez Indians (1899), H. B. Cushman tells us that mental and nervous diseases were unknown among the Choctaws and that idiocy and deformity were seldom seen. They were erect, well formed and vigorous. The Choctaw and Chichasaw mother, about to deliver her baby, retired alone, to some private place and, in a few hours, returned with her baby and quietly resumed her occupations. No midwife attended her and her delivery was almost always painless, thus evincing a degree of health rarely observed in civilized women. The Indians were very solicitous of the welfare of their children. As one Choctaw expressed it: “The aged men of my people always expressed more concern for the welfare of the young than they did for themselves.”

Hunting formed an important part of their way of life, although most of the tribes also indulged in agriculture and in food gathering that gave them many wild fruits and nuts, such as acorns, pecans, walnuts and hickory nuts. In Kentucky, Tennessee and adjacent regions they gathered and ate the pawpaw. Wild berries also were eaten. In their hunting practices, they were not sportsmen, but food getters. “No animal,” says Cushman, “adapted for food was ever killed in wanton sport by any Indian hunter.” This rule of killing also prevailed among the civilized tribes. He mentions the deer, wild turkey, squirrels and other game eaten by the Indians. On the coast of Texas there resided one tribe that was sunk in cannibalism. It seems to have been slowly dying out and there does not seem to remain even a remnant of these man-eaters—anthropophages.

Almost from one end of the Americas to the other, maize (com) was a staple article of diet, being raised by most of the tribes and prepared in a variety of ways. Beans and potatoes, also, were raised and eaten. Cushman tells us of¹“the little fields of com, pumpkins, potatoes and beans” of the Chickasawas. De Soto, in recounting his visit to the Choctaw chief Tuscaloosa (Tush Ka Lusa) in Mobila (Moma Binah), says that on the third day of their march they passed through many populous towns well stored with com, beans and other provisions. Honey they gathered from the hollow trees in which the bees stored it.

The Native American wore few or no clothes, was in the open air most of his life and moved his camp-site when it became insanitary. He bathed in the rivers and streams, ate his food simply prepared, much of it raw and with a minimum of processing. His was an active life, the children engaging in games that, for the most part, imitated the activities of the hunters and warriors. Wrestling, dancing, running, archery, ball games, swimming, canoeing, and similar types of activity constituted exercise. The ball games of the Choctaws and their neighboring tribes were awesome sights. To his trials of strength, wrestling, foot racing, jumping, etc., he added horse racing after the coming of Europeans.

Three highly advanced civilizations existed on the American continents at the time of their discovery by Columbus—the Maya, Aztec and Inca or Peruvian, of which the Maya was the most advanced—which were ruthlessly destroyed by the gold-hungry Spaniards. All of these peoples had made considerable advances in the arts and sciences; the Mayans, at least, had means of writing, while their pyramids rival, if they do not surpass in architectural beauty, those of Egypt. Standing on the borderline between prehistory and history, they supply us with added insight into the ways of prehistoric man.

Like the Peruvians, the Mayans were an agricultural people. Their lives were simple and largely spent in the open air, farming, fishing, hunting and in their boats, as they were navigators that got as far east as Cuba. They carried on an extensive trade along the coast. They weaned their children at the age of four, a practice common to natives all over the Americas. Spanish eye-witnesses of the Mayans at the time of the Spanish colonization of America, describe the young children as “pretty and plump, good and frolicsome, running naked as they played at hunting games.” Later the boys donned a sort of G-string and the girls tied a shell over the mound of Venus. All through their lives, these scantily clad people were in daily contact with the sun and air.

The Mayan farmer, who went to work in the fields at early dawn, had a drink of maize water for breakfast. He took with him to the fields to eat at noon, several apple-sized balls of ground maize mixed with pepper and wrapped in leaves. This noon day meal was sometimes supplemented with dried venison. The Mayan ate the principal meal of the day at sundown. “Com was the epicenter of the Mayan world,” says Victor W. Von Hagen in World of the Maya. It was eaten on every occasion and during their evening meal each diner would eat upward of twenty large-sized tortillas, which were made of ground com.

Besides com they cultivated several varieties of beans, squash, pumpkins, chayote, the pale sweet potato, avocado, sapote, papaya, melons, the sweet cassava and a root that resembles the turnip and which they called chichum. They had mulberries, the fruit of the “chewing-gum” tree and many other fruits. Honey they gathered from hollow trees. Ducks and turkeys were domesticated; deer and other game were hunted and they did considerable fishing. The Mayans ate well when food was plentiful and could endure hunger when there was no food. They fasted on special occasions but not much is known about why they fasted.

It is significant that the Mayans made amends for the killing of animals. They prayed before killing an animal and, “rather than eat the kill, the hunter would give it to another, who returned a part of it to him. All over the land hunters made amends for shedding the blood of the animals they had killed,” says Von Hagen. A similar code existed in the Austrian Tyrol.

The diet of the European masses at the time of the discovery of America was vegetarian and frugal and they ate but two meals a day. Many people went hungry and scurvy was common from food deficiency. No wonder Von Hagen says that the Mayans had a list of food-stuffs that would have made the Europeans of the time think they were living in Paradise. Medieval chroniclers often write of colossal meals washed down with vast quantities of wine. Such meals were eaten on rare occasions by nobles.

The Mayans fermented honey and made mead to which they added an alkaloid-yielding bark that they called balche. In addition to this, they drank chocolate. I can find no references to any alcoholic drink other than mead, but they may have had others.

They were an outdoor people who engaged in games as well as in hunting, farming and boating and, although short of stature, were robust and strong. They bathed often, both men and women bathing freely in the nude. By custom, their wives had a hot bath ready for the farmers when they returned in the early afternoon, from their labors in the fields. In the large cities, there were communal steam baths; where these were not available, the common man contented himself with a crudely made steam bath or a hot water bath in an improvised tub. Washing preceded and followed each meal.

Among the Mayans, Von Hagen tells us, quoting Landa, “the physicians and the sorcerers ... are the same thing.” They thought that illness and death were brought on by supernatural causes; they “diagnosed” illness by divination, burned incense and blew tobacco smoke across the patients, and performed other rites of exorcism. Like men in the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean crescent, the Mayas thought the gods had to be nourished, hence the sacrifices, some of them human.

Few Indians had salt. The Mayas were an exception and they took it with their food. Their employment of tobacco smoke in their incantatory rites in scaring demons out of the bodies of the sick may point to the origin of the tobacco habit. Indians did not chew tobacco, but soon learned to do so when the Europeans began the filthy practice.

Peruvian civilization was further advanced than that of the Aztecs and the Peruvians seem not to have resorted to human sacrifices. They were an agricultural people and highly skilled in its several arts. They cultivated a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, including the cassava and banana. Like other Indians, they raised maize of which they ate the fruit and from the stalk of which they extracted the sweet juice, often fermenting this and using it as an alcoholic drink. They also cultivated a grain that resembles rice, which they called quinoa.

They were moderate eaters, taking but two meals a day, about nine in the morning and at sunset, which was at about the same time of day throughout the year. They ate fruits, vegetables, com, game and made a bread and a wine. Their lives were spent in the open, lightly clad and in contact with the sun and air. They engaged in running, wrestling, boxing and other athletic pastimes and in mimic combats with blunted instruments. Like the Indians of North America, they often underwent fasts of several days duration as matters of discipline.

The life of the Aztec was about the same as that of the Mayan and Peruvian. They cultivated maize from which, like the Peruvians, they extracted a sweet sap which they made into a drink. They used this sap with which to sweeten chocolate, which they also cultivated. The chocolate was flavored with another product of their agricultural effort, vanilla. Mexico produced a wide variety of edible plants and fruits and much game. The Aztecs also had domesticated fowls.

In the Ancient American Civilizations (1953) Hyatt and Ruth Verrill say that “Of all our food plants, our fruits and nuts, over eighty percent are indigenous to America and were cultivated by the ancient Americans. Even the most primitive tribes had their fields and gardens where they cultivated maize, beans, squashes and pumpkins, melons of various kinds and, in the warmer areas, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and other food plants. The more cultured and civilized races—the Incas, Mayas, and the Mexicans had great areas of well-tilled land, and raised vast quantities of vegetable crops.

“It would require an entire volume to name and describe all the strictly American food plants, fruits, nuts, tubers, grains, etc., that were known to and used by the ancient Americans. Prominent among them are the various snap beans, squashes, pumpkins, water melons, peppers, egg plants, tomatoes, white and sweet potatoes, manioc or cassava, pineapples, strawberries, avocados, arrowroot, sapodillas, guavas, Jerusalem artichokes, peanuts, pecan nuts, hickory nuts, butternuts, Brazil nuts, persimmons, maguey, Surinam cherries, blackberries, blueberries, many of the grapes, raspberries, palm cabbage, pimento, vanilla, tonka beans and maize.”

This is but a partial list and does not include many foods, like the dewberry, black walnut, red haw, black haw, pawpaw, sunflower seeds and many others that grew wild in many sections of the Americas and were used. Their list omits, also, the acorn which was widely used. The department of Agriculture informs us that the Indians cultivated many plants that we are too lazy to cultivate, as they are troublesome and require more work than we like to perform. The Verrills offer, as evidence that many of these food plants had been cultivated by the Indians for thousands of years, the facts that they were “depicted on most of their ancient carvings in stone and pottery, and that many of them, such as peanuts, beans, lima beans, squash seeds and melon seeds, sweet potatoes, etc., are found buried with the mummies of the most ancient pre-Incan graves in Peru.”

There would seem to be a dearth of green or leafy vegetables in this diet, as here listed, and it will be noted that the diet of the Indian was predominantly fruitarian. Long before the arrival of Europeans these foods (most of them) had been adopted by the Indians from Chile to Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The adoption of many of them by Europeans, who took them back to Europe, rescued Europe from scurvy and hunger, and helped to wipe out many of Europe’s prevalent plagues.

Discussing what they designate the “enormous debt” that we owe to the Native American for the “many medicinal plants they gave us,” among which they list cocaine, quinine and calisaya, sarsaparilla, hipecachuana, rhubarb, aconite, wintergreen and sassafras, liverwort, arnica, boneset, gold thread, ginseng, mandrake, viburnum, tansy, yarrow and tobacco, the Verrills say: “That the people of the Old World ever managed to survive without some of these medicines that are now in daily universal use is little less than a miracle. And how they must have suffered with injuries and illnesses without sedatives, pain killers and local anesthetics that were all in use by the ancient

Americans. No one possibly can estimate the benefits that have resulted from the discovery and use of American medicinal plants and their derivatives, but undoubtedly during the centuries that have passed since the Spanish Conquest, medicines and drugs of the American Indians have saved more lives than all the Indians ever slain by the white men.” »

This effort to convert the Medicine man, a murderous and ignorant dealer in magic, into a physician and the ingredients of his magic into medicines is characteristic of the archeologists, anthropologists and historians. Few Indians had cocaine and quinine. Indeed, most of these drugs were of local growth. Tobacco, the American and European medical profession employed for a long time as a medicine and then abandoned. Quinine has proved such a flop that it is no longer in good repute. Sassafras provides salicylic acid (aspirin), but of what genuine value is it? Indeed, where is there a drug among those they list that is anything other than a poison?

The fact that all over the world, outside the Americas, the human race did survive through long ages without these American drugs and did multiply and many parts of the world did become overpopulated and they did overflow into and overrun the Americas, all without these drugs, should reveal, not that mankind survived as a result of a continuous series of miracles, but because these poisons are not necessary or even helpful to survival. If Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome and the rest of the ancient world got along without them, they do not seem to be so vitally important to human welfare. It is time for historians, anthropologists and archeologists to cease finding a medical profession where there was none, and to cease discovering benefits where there is only hurt.

Chapter 8: MAN’S PRIMEVAL MAJESTY

Modem man is sick. With all of his boasted scientific advancement, he grows progressively sicker each year. In view of the almost universality of disease, degeneracy, weakness and crime among the races of man today, we must think that man, as we know him, is congenitally diathetic and that the integers of his organism are weakened and crippled. Embarrassed as are man’s vital functions by the artificial life he has evolved under the mis-guidance of shaman, priest, physician, politician and industrialist, he is not yet reached the stage of irreversibility in his downward evolution, and regeneration is still possible. Hygienists are convinced that a return to biologic wholeness is an eminent possibility and that man’s pristine majesty may be restored by a full return to the primeval way of life upon which his pristine wholeness rested.

Whatever the truth about the possibility of a restoration of full health, the fact remains that today health is something almost forgotten; something immensely precious that we long for, but seldom acquire. We look backward to a Golden Age and forward to a life in heaven, but we have placed a question mark before our present age. Cancer and heart disease, insanity and apoplexy, diabetes and cerebral palsy have increased so much among us that we are pessimistic and growing more so in spite of the daily assurances of our medical scientists that they are rapidly “conquering” our diseases and need but a few billions more of dollars to complete the job.

Our present state of physiologic and biologic botchedness poses for us a serious problem for the future and raises a question concerning our past. We are justified in asking: Is modern man a valid standard of the race of man ? Can we accept the pathology of modem man as truly representative of the health of early man? The fact is we do use ourselves as a measuring rod with which to measure our remote ancestors. But our interpretations of the past are simply backward projections of the present, with progress always uppermost in our irrational minds. Are we correct in doing this? I am convinced that we are entirely wrong in making ourselves the standard of the race.

The conscious superiority of modem man over his ancient ancestors, our colossal conceit that prompts us to treat these ancient peoples as children and our contempt for the “primitive mind” lead us to regard ourselves as the true norm, the ultimate pattern of humanity. In our scoffing arrogance, we think of our deplorable deficiency as a measure of the vigor and soundness of our ancient prototypes. Humiliating as it must be to us, we must never forget that we are far below par in every respect, and that our standards are completely valueless, except for measuring varying degrees of ill-health. Nothing seems to me to be more absurd than the practice of using the pathology of modem man as a standard by which to judge the wholeness and soundness of our remote ancestors.

It seems to me to be highly unscientific for modem man to apply his own inadequate standards of dwarfed body and probably shrunken intellect also, to his considerations of his primeval ancestors. We should assume, from the start, that living as naturally and normally as the deer of the forest, our primitive ancestors possessed a standard of vigor and health comparable with that of the wild deer. Indeed, when we consider his greater complexity of structure, we should assume a greater degree of vigor. The perfect integration of the human organism does not lead to stagnation of the organism, but to greater functional capacity, greater freedom of action and greater powers of action. The more perfect the integration, the higher the degree of efficiency with which an organism functions.

Let us consider specific cases. Archeologists have found female images in what are called “Aurignacian Age” deposits which stress breasts, abdomen, navel and the hypograstic region; the breasts invariably hang heavy and pendulous, the abdomen protrudes in a manner that can only indicate a woman in advanced pregnancy. In one there is an exaggerated vulvar region with the arms placed over the breasts. They assume that these figures were amulets employed as aids to fertility and to assure ease of delivery or both—that they are forms of sympathetic magic. This interpretation not only projects the system of primitive magic back far beyond its probable origin, but also, and unwarrantably, projects the deficiencies of modem men and women into that remote period. It assumes that male and female sterility was as frequent then as now, that men were impotent and that women experienced the same difficulties in delivery that modem civilized women suffer. Nowhere do we find the assumption, even implied, that prehistoric man was a splendid animal, functioning normally. In this instance, the women of the “Aurignacian Age” were not equal to modem primitives in delivery.

I would suggest, on the contrary, that primitive man, unaffected by all the weakening and disturbing influences of modem life, was as fine an animal as any that we see today in wild nature, if not an even finer specimen of structural integrity and functional efficiency. I would suggest that his chief characteristic, as distinguished from modem man, was his physiological and biological excellence. I think that Howard W. Haggard, M.D., offers a better picture of childbirth among primitive women when he says in Devils, Drugs and Doctors, that “the primitive woman had little difficulty with childbirth; but she had not been exposed to the evils of civilization. Distortion of the bones of her pelvis by rickets, and the consequent difficulty or impossibility of natural birth, did not affect her, for she had not yet been subjected to the diet evolved by civilization nor did she shut herself from the radiations of the sunlight by glass and clothing. Furthermore she was not subject to that mongrelization characteristic of civilization, the cross-breeding which commerce makes possible. Her people were of one size; her baby was suited to the size of her pelvis through which it must emerge.”

The Babylonian story of Gilgamesh, in recounting the events of the flood and telling us of the conduct of the gods, who were terrified by it, says that “The goddess Ishtar cried out like a woman in travail,” a statement that indicates that the women of the Babylonians had already departed sufficiently from the normal ways of life that they experienced pain in delivering their young.

Another example of this effort to employ current pathologies as measuring rods with which to measure the physical excellence of our remote ancestors is contained in a statement by the Cambridge authority Dr. Seltman, in discussing ancient Greek women. He says: “Until fairly recent years puerperal fever was a danger which carried off young mothers, especially with first pregnancies. One must assume that a similar danger beset young Greek women having the normal kind of bourgeois background.” Why must one make such an assumption, especially in the face of a total lack of all evidence for it? There is no more reason why sane and clean living women should have puerperal fever than that animals in the wild should have the disease.

Seltman had previously shown that the Greek women were healthy, athletic and happy. They led an active, outdoor life, largely nude and were not addicted to the dietary indiscretions of the present. Certainly they possessed a degree of health that European and American women of the immediate past lacked. Besides this fact, puerperal fever was seen almost wholly in mothers who were delivered by physicians with their dirty hands, and not in women delivered by female midwives. Puerperal fever is prevented by cleanliness and the Greeks were a clean people. We should not permit medical propaganda and the evanescent theories of the profession to determine our interpretations of the past.

Let Haggard again testify on this point. He says: “The woman of native or primitive peoples was not in horror of the devastation of childbed fever. The hand of no medical student or accoucheur of the pre-antiseptic age brought to her the contamination from the autopsy room or from her stricken sisters. Nor did she take her place in the filthy bed of a hospital of the seventeenth, eighteenth and even early nineteenth centuries, to lie perhaps with four other patients in a bed five feet wide, as at the Hotel Dieu at Paris, and wait, if she survived the fetid air, the pestilence of the place, and the butchery of the midwife or student, for .the fever, engendered by the weather, which killed from two to twenty of every hundred of her sisters who were forced to accept the fatal charity of such places.” Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes correctly accused physicians of killing mothers.

Seltman contends that “at no time in the world’s history can woman have been so contented, so health/ and happy” as in the Sparta of Lysander or the Athens of Pericles. He informs us that it was the gymnasium and not the vote that emancipated the women of Greece and indicates that the revival of athletics among women of today has done more to emancipate modem women than has the vote, the importance of which no longer seems so great to women. He pictures to us little girls playing bears in Athens, older ones racing at Olympia, wrestling with boys at Chios, going to school at Sappho’s Finishing School, dancing at Orthia’s altars and fluting at feasts. They managed their households, bullied their husbands or took a lover and, like Atalanta, wore abbreviated dress. If they sometimes drank wine, they did not smoke, they had no tea or coffee, they had no white bread, no white sugar and candy—their food was simple and natural. They bathed regularly and had their time in the sun. Why assume that such women suffered the troubles of our corset-wearing grandmothers?

It is generally assumed by anthropologists that under primitive conditions, the ability to survive depended on a physical body that could quickly marshal and arouse its energy and mobilize its forces for fight or flight. It need hardly be added that the life of primitive man was not made up solely of fighting and fleeing, but that he had to meet and master many problems that required not only great physical strength and great endurance, but also great mental ingenuity. He had to be as alert of sense as the animals of the wild, as ingenious as the spider in weaving its web, and as capable of sustained action as the most enduring animal. All of this required a degree of physical and mental health of which we of today hardly dream. Health was fitness, the fitness that survives.

The reluctant admission by anthropologists that prehistoric societies probably possessed as high a ratio of potential geniuses as modem societies, is based on the implied assumption that prehistoric man was as deficient and defective as his modem botched descendent. His brain structure is assumed to have been as lopsidedly evolved as that of the people we see walking the streets today, an assumption for which there is no valid evidence. But we are determined that our ancestors shall be, if not inferior to us, at least not any better. Such is our egotism and pride!

Recently I read an admission in a leading Socialist publication that “all men are not equal in mental or physical capacity.” The writer pointed out that “human beings of today, though basically no different, are qualitatively different from, say, human beings of the prehistoric era.” “A child of today,” the writer went on to say, “with the aid of Arabic numerals and easily digested mathematics—can perform calculations that required genius in the social atmosphere of ancient Greece.” Thus, as he pictured it, our assumed superiority over our ancient kin is a matter of social acquirements, not of greater intellectual endowments. We have accumulated knowledge and tools, hence our children in high school know more than did Aristotle, who couldn't pass an examination in present-day high school biology.

Just as the intellect of Aristotle is not to be measured against a modem background, but against the social background in which he lived, so the intellects of our prehistoric forebears are to be measured against the background of their own social environment. But this provides us with no information about their potential genius. The least among them may have been equal to our greatest; the symmetrical development of their brains may be guessed at by the remarkable symmetry of the Cro-Magnon skull, as contrasted with the frightening deformity and disharmony of the modem European and American skull. We may also well doubt that there was even a fraction of the amount of mental disease among them that is seen among us today. On the whole, geniuses seem to be merely better specimens of man. They commonly have better bodies and better brains. We seem to be on safe ground when we assume that better bodies and better brains were the rule among our prehistoric ancestors.

Knowing that modem savages, such as the Native Americans of a few decades ago, were able to run down and catch a deer, we should not be so ready to sell short our ancient ancestors. Tales of valor and great strength that have come down to us from the remote past (from prehistory and the earliest days of history) should not be summarily dismissed as fables. Hercules, Jason, Ajax, Achilles, Milo and similar heroes of the mythical past were products of a culture and a way of life that far transcends ours insofar as it supplied to the bodies of the people the requirements of maximum development. We are prone to dismiss these ancient heroes as fanciful fictions only because we recognize in them our superiors.

Mankind’s ancient legends tell us of a Golden Age in which there were no seasons, but during which, it was warm the whole year through and man lived in peace and sustained himself upon the spontaneous products of the soil; he was not then an eater of flesh and a drinker of blood. These legends tell us of a change of climate, when icy winds first began to blow, when man was forced to cultivate the soil, when some men began to kill and eat animals. During this Golden Age man was free of sickness and attained a great age. After the Golden Age he began to suffer and his life span was greatly shortened.

Legend! Yes. But who is there so bold as to declare that such legends are not the blurred memories of an actual past? Perhaps the

Golden Age was the time man spent in the tropics, before he began to spread over the earth. Perhaps the changes of climate were met when he migrated into the temperate regions. On the other hand, geology tells us of an eternal spring-like climate that once extended from pole to pole. Perhaps the legends of the Golden Age take us back to the time before the earth’s climate underwent a radical change.

Hesiod’s Golden Age, an age about which the Greeks were most fervent, finds its counterpart in the legends or traditions of many peoples. The Biblical story of the Garden of Eden is a re-telling of an older story that was current among the Sumerians and Babylonians. The people of India, the aborigines of Australia, the Indians of the Americas, the Polynesians, the Eskimos, the Chinese and many other peoples had a similar tradition. In Celtic and Nordic legends and in other European legends, we have a similar story of a golden past. Of the Golden Age of the Greeks, Professor Elliot Smith says: “Anthropologists have provided us with the most definite evidence that such a condition of affairs as the poets describe, did in fact exist. No amount of ridicule can blind us to the true meaning of the overwhelming mass of information which is now available in substantiation of this conclusion.”

These traditions may be regarded as racial memories of a time when man lived, perhaps for a long period of time, under ideal conditions; perhaps at a time when the climate of the earth was vastly different from what it now is. Originally man probably thrived in some favorable, peaceful part of the earth that was lush with fruits that were good for food. Perhaps it was the change of Earth’s climate that forced him out of the Edenic paradise. Fossil palms, coal beds, coral reefs and other warm-climate plants and animals found within the Arctic circle and in Iceland, and many other similar evidences, make it clear that there was a time in the remote past when the whole earth was delightfully warm. It is thought that the unknown land that now lies under thousands of feet of ice at the south pole was probably covered with vegetation instead of ice. There were, then, no seasons as we know them, but a spring-like summer lasted throughout the year. The entire earth was filled with luxurious green things; flowers bloomed all the year through and fruits ripened all the year round.

Man lived in health and strength and experienced an exquisite harmony with an absence of discord and in freedom from pain and discomfort. His life was a physiological thrill, every cell in his body singing in unison, not a note out of tune, not a beat out of time, denoting the unity and wholeness of function of the well integrated organism, the fineness and excellence of its tissues and the vigor and efficiency of its functions that provide for the real joy of living.

Hesiod describes a vast amount of woes and ills that came upon mankind sometime in the prehistoric period. He doubtless set down in writing, traditions that were old when he wrote. It is hardly likely that these woes and ills would have occupied a prominent place in tradition, if they were normal elements of man’s existence. They made a deep impression upon the race precisely because they were . abnormal and unusual. Prior to the time of which Hesiod writes, there* must have existed a race of healthy, vigorous men, women and children, who understood the art of living. Today we do not live, we do not have an art of life: we can construct canals and bridges, intercontinental missiles and space rockets, but we cannot construct life.

That man, who lacks both weapons of offense and defense, has become the most wanton killer in all nature and the one most addicted to fratricide and internecine killing would seem to point to some great and radical deterioration of his make-up. No other being on the earth engages in the vast wars of mutual extermination in which man engages. Within the lifetime of millions now living, he has engaged in two global wars and is, even now, girding his loins for an even more destructive third world war. Who can doubt that this is a symptom of his increasing insanity?

Man owed his survival throughout a long prehistoric period, when, it is assumed, the living conditions he faced were more rigorous than those of today, to a more vigorous brand of function than he now possesses. We can but guess at the robust powers of our remote ancestors. The larger and stronger bones, better teeth and larger brains found in the remains of prehistoric man, may also indicate better vision, greater strength, more vigorous health, greater ruggedness, more stamina and longer life than we possess. Indeed, we are justified in assuming a prehistoric wholeness of man, of which man of today is but a fragmented wreck. Modern man has lost much of the primal sanities and composures of his primitive forebears. Prehistoric man was no trembling coward standing in faint-hearted awe before the thunder and lightning and fleeing in panic before “diseases” he did not understand. Fear of disease was cultivated by the priestcraft and the drug-craft at a later age to better enable them to exploit the common people.

Modem man is not the equal of Cro-Magnon man and of several other ancient peoples, neither in physical excellence, nor in brain capacity. Modern man’s bone structure is fragile, his dentition is feeble; he is lacking in both stamina and fleetness; his special senses are blunted—his sense of smell is feeble, his growing employment ot glasses and hearing aids attests to the deterioration of his vision and hearing. He stands as a symposium of deficiencies and proudly prates of his superiority and advancement. If we class these deficiencies, as others have done, as biological inadequacies, must we not, also, at the same time recognize them as results of degeneration? Even Homer’s

heroes and heroines, men and women who lived long before he did, were members of a stronger race than the one to which he belonged.

The standard of health expected of the average man and woman of antiquity, and regarded by peoples of the past as an essential factor of happiness, is no longer required, upheld or even recognized among present-day Western peoples as the first requisite of a life worth living. Preceding the discovery of fire, which ushered in our crazy civilization, with its incessant toil and its spoilage of everything nature produces, the Golden Age, which Hesiod so well describes, saw a mankind so superior to us as to lead to the belief that they were a different race. Hesiod tells us: “For ere this the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sickness, which brings the Fates upon them; for in misery men grow old quickly ... Of themselves diseases came upon men continually by day and by night, bringing mischief to mortals silently.”

Chapter 9: HERITAGE FROM EDEN

History did not dawn all over the world at the same time. Civilizations in different parts of the earth arose at different times, flourished and passed away. Contemporaneous with these civilizations, even contemporaneous with our own, there have existed great areas of the globe in which prehistoric man continued, and continues to live and carry on in the traditional pattern. Somewhere on the earth today practically all the cultural stages through which man is assumed to have passed in his climb to civilization, are represented. There are tribes that are still in the stone age and there are millions of cave dwellers still with us. There are nomadic tribes and there are dwellers in small communities. There are food gatherers, hunters, cultivators of the soil; there is chattel slavery, and feudalism; there is primitive communism and there are the vast modern empires with their complex civilizations. In some parts of the world the Middle Ages are still flourishing. Instead, then, of there being a sharp dividing line between history and prehistory, there is an overlapping of the two. Because mankind still exists in all stages of culture, it is possible to study him at almost all cultural levels.

We are accustomed to think of man’s progress in complexness of civilization as representing some kind of evolution of man himself. This mistake is made because we have uncritically accepted the Darwinian myth as true. When we observe stone age people skip all the intermediate stages of cultural development and hop into the atomic age in one generation, as the Manus people of New Guinea did, we are compelled to doubt that cultural stages result from any evolution of man. Many of our accepted hypotheses and theories are in great need of overhauling or of junking. Even those great extensions of chronology indulged in by geologists, paleontologists, anthropologists and archeologists, to whom a million years are no more than a million dollars are to our national administration, are probably erroneous. Man’s antiquity may not be so great as assumed.

A large amount of what is said about prehistoric man is based on what are regarded as permissible comparisons with recent or contemporary human groups who were or still remain in a state of savagery. Anthropologists are fond of the thesis that existing savages are primitives and that by projecting them backward in time into the prehistoric period, we may gain a fairly accurate picture of prehistoric man. This seems to me to be a perfectly legitimate procedure providing only that we do not project too much into the past. It would be inaccurate to think of modem non-literate peoples as being in the immediate prehistoric stage of human culture for four reasons as follows:

1. Civilized man, in the immediate prehistoric period, was much further advanced culturally, than is the modem non-literate savage. When recorded history began, civilization had already reached an advanced stage. There were large cities, long trade routes, large edifices, much organization, irrigation and drainage systems and considerable knowledge of mathematics, astronomy and the rudiments of other sciences.

2. The non-literate savage of today has many elements in his culture that he has borrowed from several late sources. The Negro, for example, has lived in close contact with civilization, first Egyptian, then Greek and Roman, and, finally, modem, for six thousand years. The ancient Egyptians penetrated far into Negro territory. It would be absurd to think that during all this long period of time the Negro has borrowed nothing from civilized contacts. It seems highly probable, for example, that he borrowed circumcision from the ancient Egyptians. How many of his other superstitions and magic rites did he acquire from the same source? Did he get the bow, the spear, the shield and the boat from this source, also? The fact that so-called living primitives have particular notions does not prove that these are inseparable from the blood and sinew of man. We must always keep in mind that all existing primitives are recipients of a common heritage.

3. Many of the living primitives have shown a distinct disinclination to become civilized, thus showing, I believe, a certain incapacity for advancement. In my opinion, it is absurd to assume, without adequate justification, that those prehistoric peoples, who made the greatest progress in the arts and sciences, stood still for long ages before they began to progress. To assume that the peoples who developed the various cultures of the past stood still for long ages, as have the primitives who still exist and who have either resisted the encroachments of civilization or are incapable of high culture, is to overlook the obvious fact that they did not stand still. This makes it unsafe to project the present-day savage backward into the life of the prehistoric Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Phoenician, Greek, etc.

4. It is the height of the ridiculous to ascribe to primeval man the stupidities of which modem man, both savage and civilized, is guilty. Altogether too many of our stupidities, which are of comparatively recent origin, are projected backward by anthropologists into the life of primitive man. There is no doubt in my mind that the system by which modem savages, the men of early history, and to some extent, modem civilized man, attempt and attempted to control the forces and processes of nature, and which is known as primitive magic, was not truly primitive and that it is projected backward in the life of the race to a period ages before its earliest development. Its diffusion over the whole earth indicates that it had its origin before the dawn of history, but how long before this dawn it is difficult to estimate. It seems to have reached its highest development in Babylon, Crete and Egypt in the historic period and may have had its origin in the immediate prehistoric period among one of these peoples. I doubt that its origin antedates the dawn of history by no more than two or three centuries.

For these reasons, among others, it is only when it can be shown that the conditions of man in antiquity most closely parallel those of living primitives that we have modem examples of prehistoric man for first-hand study. The peoples of northern Europe at the time of Caesar more closely represented immediate prehistoric man. They lived in small villages and large towns, tilled the soil, carried on an extensive commerce over lengthy routes, mined metals, worked in metals, were skilled artists and artisans, built large edifices, and lacked only written language to have left a history of themselves.

After all has been said, however, there remains the cold, hard fact that if we study modem man in his highest cultural phases and contrast him with his modem brother in the lowest cultural phases, we deal with the same basic organism and the same basic needs. This is the central fact of human life that must guide us in our efforts to understand the ways of life of prehistoric man. That this fact presents us with a fundamental meaningful principle of integration, by which prehistoric man and modern man may be studied, will hardly be denied. What follows from this is that the modem savage, no matter what his culture, as much as modem civilized man, like primitive man, must supply the same basic needs of human existence and must manifest the same urges and instincts indicating these needs.

Most living primitives are stationary populations living in villages. Few of them are nomadic. If they sometimes move their villages, they do not wander over the face of the earth with their herds. In this particular they may represent the normal way of life of primitive man.

They spend their lives in the open air, are physically very active, retire early, as they have not learned to turn the night into day as we do, and arise early. They would seem to lead about the same kind of life that prehistoric man must have lived. Unless we so class their ceremonial dances, few if any of them have any systems of formal exercise, but they are commonly well developed. No general statement about the life of modern savages will fit all tribes and peoples, but, there is a sufficient uniformity about the basic features of their ways of life that we can rely on what has here been said about their mode of existence.

The eating practices of living primitives are so varied and various that it would be impossible to form any opinion of man’s primitive diet by studying these. If we study the practices of each tribe, whether isolated or in contact with other tribes, we run up against such a medley of practices that we become bewildered. Eating customs among certain tribes that prohibit men eating with their mothers-in-law and that prohibit two families of in-laws from having friendly meals together, certainly grew out of no instinctive practices of mankind. They are tabus based on magical requirements. Their dietary habits are as variable as their sexual habits and customs and they cannot teach us what was the diet of primitive man. A few facts may be stated about them, however, that are true:

1. Their foods are natural, by which is meant that they are not processed and refined. They have not been adulterated, artificially colored and flavored and have not been chemically “conditioned” and preserved.

2. They eat much of their food in the uncooked state, even, in many instances, taking uncooked flesh.

3. Much of their food is eaten fresh; eaten either freshly plucked from the tree or garden or freshly killed.

4. Their meals are, as a rule, very simple; many course dinners are not eaten by them.

5. They do not in most instances have an abundance of foods, except, perhaps, at certain seasons, so that overeating and sumptuous fare is rare to non-existent among them.

6. Mothers among modern primitives nurse their infants and children for prolonged periods and do not depend upon the animal kingdom to nurse their offspring for them. Savage mothers are, as a rule, very attentive to the needs of their offspring, loving them as much and as deeply as civilized mothers love their children.

7. As a rule, to which there are few exceptions, the native diets of savages are adequate to sustain them in health and vigor; whereas, when the refined and processed diet of civilization is introduced among them, they suffer greatly from malnutrition. The teeth of these primitives are sound on their native diets and rapidly decay an civilized diets.

8. Several tribes of the present exist under circumstances that provide them with insufficient and inadequate food, so that they suffer from the resulting malnutrition. There must have been similar examples of deprivation and want in the life of prehistoric man, for he wandered far and wide over the earth and met many different circumstances.

When it is said, as Andre Missenard does say, that “The primitive eats practically anything that lives, from the herbivorous animals down to the insects and grubs which he makes into pap,” this must be taken as a statement of the eating habits of “primitives” in the generic sense. No single tribe of primitives has such catholic food habits. He adds that: “His eclectic taste extends to creatures of the sea and also to all parts of the beast he considers edible.” The last part of his statement implies that there are beasts which he does not consider edible, a fact that is true of all primitive tribes. He adds that “While the civilized palate seems to prefer muscle tissue, the primitive eats everything, especially the internal organs.” By thus eating the internal organs and not confining himself to the fat and muscles, the primitive secures a more adequate food supply. Especially do these internal parts supply more minerals and vitamins and often, better proteins. Muscle proteins are not adequate as Berg has pointed out; animal protein is adequate only if the entire animal is eaten.

Missenard adds that: “All primitives eat vegetable as well as animal matter. And where plant life is scarce, as in the Arctic, the Eskimo will hunt his vegetable diet in the very stomach of the reindeer he has killed,” a fact which reveals the vital importance of vegetables, even when the whole animal is eaten. To follow Missenard a little further, he says: “Primitive man does less cooking than his civilized brother. He eats many fruits and vegetables raw, as he does eggs and milk.” Many islanders eat their fish and other sea foods uncooked. Before the discovery of fire and perhaps, for a long period thereafter, man ate all of his foods uncooked, just as the animals still do.

Although we find sunbathing practiced by certain modem primitives, especially in certain diseases, in a great part of the world, the “natives,” as we disdainfully call the indigenous populations of many parts of the earth, may be seen nude or nearly so most of the year. They, like their primitive forebears, get the sun as a regular part of their daily living without having to set aside special times and places for sunbathing.

Among modem savages much attention is paid to cleanliness of the body. Although a few modern savages are not noted for cleanliness, most tribes are scrupulously clean, bathing often in rivers, lakes and oceans. Anthropologists tell us attention to bodily cleanliness is universal among them. If this may be accepted as a valid criterion, as anthropologists commonly think, we may say that prehistoric man bathed and kept himself clean; that neglect of bathing, as in the Middle Ages, and until recent modem times, was not a primitive trait. I would again stress in this connection, the fact that a knowledge of the value of cleanliness and of the evils of uncleanliness long antedates the origin of the medical profession, and that, although the ancient priesthoods enjoined cleanliness, the value of cleanliness was recognized by man long before there was a priestcraft.

The prohibition against urinating or vomiting into a stream that is found among many of our living primitives would seem to be an empirically discovered means of avoiding contamination of the water supply and not an instinctive practice. It would be interesting to know just how far back in time this prohibition originated and how much of the body of primitive man practiced it. The prohibition found among certain modem primitives against drinking water from a tap may not be an instinctive practice, but may come under the heading of empirically discovered knowledge. It may'be only a magic tabu. This remains to be determined.

Apparently every possible form of sexual activity is practiced by these modem primitives, as they are practiced, also, in civilized life. Few of them are universal, some of them being found among certain tribes and others among other tribes. In civilized life none of them are practiced by all men and women, and most of them are conventionally condemned. There is nothing in the nature of man nor in the nature of many of these practices to indicate that they are essential to his survival and there can be no doubt that many of them are definitely harmful—harmful mentally, physically and socially. Many of the sexual and marital practices of savages are of magical origin. Circumcision, for example, which is a widespread practice, grew directly out of magic requirements and has no relation either to man’s sexual needs or to those of hygiene. Pubertal rites are of magic origin, as are many of the rites that accompany childbirth.

Comparative studies of reproduction among modern nonliterate tribes have shown that these are commonly more moral than many of the most civilized communities. There seems to have been a decline in natural virtue rather than a primitive immorality of man. Of 44 primitive peoples studied, pre-marital coitus does not occur in 26. Extra-marital intercourse does not occur in 28 out of 36, and is almost invariably severely censured when it does. Coitus during pregnancy is not practiced in 21 of 29, which shows that continence is a natural possibility and gives the lie to the psychiatrists who insist that mental disease is the price of abstinence. Obviously, if men and women are to live together for years or for a whole life time, periodic continence is indispensable.

We discover as many abnormal and unnatural practices among savages as among the civilized. The Native Americans’ use of tobacco and coca are examples that come readily to mind. Many savage tribes have recourse to fermented drinks as freely as do civilized men. A study of the lives of savages, however extensive, cannot provide us with a clear picture of the life of primitive man, for the reason that, however much of primitive life they may be assumed to have retained, they have also accumulated a heavy load of magical and superstitious practices and of habits that had no place in the life of primitive man. It is impossible to determine what is the normal sexual life of man by studying his many and varied sexual practices, as these are carried out by the various tribes and races of man. Their sexual habits are as variable as their dietary customs and they cannot teach us what was the sexual life of primitive man.

If we attempt to establish a human norm of sexual conduct by studying the sexual life of wild animals, it will be necessary to study the sex life of those animals that are nearest to man in structure and function—the higher anthropoids—and we know precious little of their sex life in the wild state.

At this point it may be well to emphasize a fact that has been more or less ignored up to the present; namely, that man is more than an animal. So far we have considered him as an animal, living and meeting the exigencies of existence as an animal. That he is an animal admits of no doubt. He possesses organs, nerves, blood, muscles, bones and brain similar to other mammals; he develops similar diseases, is host to similar or the same parasites, feeds, grows and matures under the same conditions that other animals do, experiences pain and pleasure from the same kinds of bodily contacts with his environment, and perceives by means of similar sense organs. He sees with eyes, hears with ears, and smells with a nose as they do.

But there are several marked differences between man and the animals beneath him that set him apart as quite clearly a distinct and different type of being. His body differs far more radically from that of the highest ape than that of the ape differs from that of the horse or cow. He is an animal but he is not related by blood ties to any other animal. The texture and quality of man’s hair, the shape of his nose, lips and back, his upright posture, the peculiar shape of his feet and his style of locomotion, the peculiar shape of his teeth and jaws, his greater breadth from side to side, the length and opposable power of his thumbs, his exclusive ownership of a chin and non-projecting canines, the size and greater complexity of his brain, the way he speaks and the fact that he develops types of disease that are peculiar to him, all help to set him apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Man’s body is quite similar in structure and function to that of the higher apes, but the differences in the two types of organisms are great enough and radical enough that they set the two families apart. The differences between the body of man and that of the highest ape, living or fossil, are radical enough to separate them into distinct biological families. Man is not an improved ape; he is not descended from the ape. This accounts for the fact that biologists and paleontologists have been unable to discover an ape-ancestor for him. The earliest fossils of man are those of man, not of intermediate forms. He appears suddenly in the geological record, as though he has no antecedents.

For the reason that man is not an ape, no study of the normal sexual life of the ape in his wild state can give more than hints as to what man’s normal sexual life should be. We certainly should not attempt to place the sexual life of man on the same level with that of any other animal; it should possess a dignity of its own which that of the animals lacks.

The care of the sick among modem savages, before they were debauched by their civilized neighbors, was in the hands of the medicine-man or priest. His magic rites w6re the same as those found in ancient Egypt and Babylon. He rarely resorted to what may be classed as “internal medication,” but relied upon his incantations and charms as faithfully as did the ancient Greeks and Romans. Acutely ill savages do fast and we do find fasting practiced among many savage tribes for various reasons, most of them magical. What is called “primitive” medicine, as practiced among these peoples, is the same kind of magic that was employed by ancient civilized peoples before they evolved the system of drugging that is now called medicine.

Our considerations of modem savage life indicate that, in great measure, it closely parallels what appears to have been the life of prehistoric man. In certain particulars it would seem to parallel the immediate prehistoric period and not that of the more remote periods of human existence. Before the coming among them of physicians from civilized nations they survived under a wide variety of circumstances, many of them definitely opposed to the highest condition of human welfare, by dependence upon the primal sanities that guided primeval man. They place much dependence upon the obviously useless ceremonials of the medicine-man. Certainly when a sick savage recovers and nothing more has been done by the medicine-man than to rattle a gourd filled with pebbles or to dance around his wigwam and chant prayers to the spirits, he recovers, as do civilized patients, by virtue of his own inherent restorative powers.

Chapter 10: IT IS GOD THAT HEALS

In the opaque language of inspiration, in the 103rd Psalm, David says: “It is God (Jehovah) that healeth all diseases.” This is precisely the idea of healing that was promoted by the priesthood in all the nations of antiquity. In Sumer, in Egypt, in Babylon, in Crete, in Greece, in Phoenicia, in Rome, this idea prevailed. They did not all worship the same god or gods, but they all had the same idea about healing. Nor should this seem strange. So long as it was thought that the gods regulate and personally execute all terrestrial phenomena down to the minutest detail, and that the phenomena of disease were evidences of an interference by supernatural power in the functions of the body and the conception prevailed that human art is to no purpose in any case of disease, and aid must be found with the gods, no other logical plan of caring for the sick is conceivable. Our ancestors were as logical as we, even if their premises were such as are no longer acceptable.

As god produced disease and he alone could avert it or remedy it, it was only logical that the priesthood should be the intermediaries who would appeal to the gods for succor for the sick. Doubtless the priesthood arose by easy stages out of some primitive social task, such as that of the fire tender or that of observer of the passage of the seasons, a function sometimes entrusted to the oldest and wisest members of the tribe or even to a single family. The primary duty of the priestly class in Sumer, Egypt and distant Yucatan was that of custodian of the calendar. The offices of the priestly class must have increased with the passage of time.

The god Hea, both with the primitive Akkadians and their Assyrian successors, was the Lord of Life and Grand Master of “the mysterious Rite, the formula, the all-powerful secret word, which would thwart the efforts of the formidable powers of the Abyss.” Sayce says of Hea that “He was emphatically the god of healing, who had revealed medicine to mankind.” His son, Merodakh (the Bel of Babylon) was revered as the Prince of Light, the Conqueror of the Dragon, the Redeemer of Mankind and Bestower of Life. As he was the divinity of the planet Jupiter, the custom arose of placing his symbol at the beginning of magical formulae, as a prayer for benign offices. The practice of placing his symbol on drug prescriptions is still in vogue. Here is one of the prayers addressed to him:

Merciful one among the gods,

Generator who brought back the dead to life, Silik-mulu-khi, the king of heaven and earth,

May the invalid be delivered from his disease,

Cure the plague, the fever, the ulcer.

Silik-mulu-khi is an Akkadian name of Merodakh signifying “The one who brings good to human beings.” He is petitioned to cure in the translation. Translators are prone to inject later meanings into ancient terms, thus confusing both themselves and their readers. Both Hea and Merodakh are depicted with the fir-cone in one hand. The fircone was supposed to be possessed of healing and magical virtues and was employed in religious and magical ceremonials. Assyrian sculpture pictures the Tree of Life as having cones like those of the pine and fir and these cones were placed upon the wand or thyros which was borne in religious processions. Either this symbol or an image of Hea or Merodakh was placed, one on each side of the door of the room of the sick, and sacred texts were hung about the room and head. Incantations, like the following, were employed:

Disease of the bowels, disease of the heart,

The palpitation of the heart;

Disease of the vision, disease of the head,

Malignant dysentery;

The humor which swells,

Ulceration of the veins, the micturition which wastes,

Cruel agony which never ceases,

Nightmare,.....

Spirit of heaven, conjure it,

Spirit of earth, conjure it.

It is obvious that the translator has played fast and loose with this invocation and has employed words to translate the ancient text that convey to us meanings the text did not possess. For example, the humoral hypothesis, which had its origin in Greece, did not arise until centuries after this incantation or invocation was uttered. More honestly, the translator used the word conjure instead of the word cure with which to translate the request of the Akkadian priest.

Although some medical “historians” assert that the Babylonian priests employed herbs along with their astrology and incantations, they taught their patients to believe that their recovery was wrought by divine operation. If they thought that “it is the gods who heal,” they must have employed herbs, if they ever employed them, as part of their incantatory rites. Efforts are made by historians to show that pharmacy was an art among the Assyrians, but the examples of the pharmaceutical art with which they supply us are examples of the mixing of a wide variety of substances to be used in incantatory rites. They attempt to rationalize their foolish effort to create an ancient pharmacology by reminding us that anciently, the various branches of “learning” were not differentiated as they are today, so that medical knowledge (sic) was included with astrology (they commonly say astronomy), religious worship and magical lore.

It seems that the idea that diseases are due to invasion of the body by evil spirits arose at a later date. God preceded the devils, as the cause of disease, and prayers and sacrifices preceded the rites of exorcism as means of recovery. Evil spirits may have been an afterthought. A theo-etiology necessitated a theotherapy, and this was everywhere provided by the priestcraft. Divine healing, as we call it today, was the first healing man employed. The gods visited the temples and performed their healing work. Perhaps, initially at least, they healed outside the temples.

In answer to Zoroaster’s question: Who was the first man skilled in healing, the all-wise and powerful god Ahur'mazda replied: Thrita. Thrita had besought the giver of all good to make known to him the means of dealing successfully with disease. Ahur'mazda adds: “Then, I, who am Ahur'mazda, brought into existence the healing plants, many and many hundreds, many and many thousands, many and many tens of thousands, and with them the glorious one Gokarene—the white hima or tree of life—giving health to the bodies of men... I counteract sickness; I combat pestilence; I resist pain, fever, the putrid ulceration, the foulness, the malignant eye which the Evil spirit inflicts upon human beings—every disorder and mortal ailment, every sorcerer and witch, and every malign influence.”

If god heals all diseases and counteracts every evil influence, if he combats the evil sorcerers and witches, and combats the evil spirit with his “malignant eye,” one naturally wonders what need there is for a pharmacopeia that possesses even more drugs than that of modem medicine. It is most likely that all of these herbs crept into the reply of Ahur'mazda to Zoroaster’s question long after the death of Zoroaster. The Parsees took their Vanidad with them to India and introduced its beliefs and practices among the Hindu tribes. Magic moved eastward, but magic had reached India earlier as their own sacred books indicate. The Yajur Veda is a medical treatise. Part of it is ancient, part of it is commentaries by late writers. When historians tell us the sacred books of the Hindus indicate a very thorough conception and knowledge of the healing art, they place these ancient people ahead of the healing professions of today. Their loose talk is deplorable, but they are determined to create a medical profession out of the fragments of ancient magic they grubble from the shards and middens of ancient lore.

Ahur'mazda tells Zoroaster: “I am the healer, it is I who counteracts diseases and pestilences; it is I who resists pain and fever and ulcerations; it is I who protects against all evil influences.” Not only were the gods the first healers, but they continued to be the real healers long after the rise of those religious systems that devoted their time to the care of the sick. The temples were often a kind of sanitorium where the means of restoring the sick to health had been revealed by the guardian divinity of the shrine.

The Assyrian priests of Gibel claimed mystical power over disease, while the Egyptian priests thought they could have actual communication with divinity and they believed that the most salutary physical results might be obtained from such communications. The prominent gods of healing of the Egyptian pantheon were Isis, Osiris, Thoth, Hermes, Phthra, Imhotep and Serapis or Serapeon. It was in the temples dedicated to these gods and goddesses that the Egyptians sought to be healed when they were ill. When they recovered, it was their thought and they were so taught by the priesthood, that it was the god or goddess who had healed them. All ancient peoples who have left us records of their activities and thoughts had their healing divinities and they all thought, originally, at least, as did the Homeric Greeks, that the “sending of disease to mankind’’ was a special act of the immortals.

Moses deals with leprosy in the 13th chapter of Leviticus and regarded prayer as the chief means of recovery. All through the Old Testament, disease is pictured as an infliction sent upon the people by God for their transgressions. Miriam murmured against Moses and was struck with leprosy, of which she was not freed until Moses prayed to God to restore her to health. A revolt of the people resulted in an epidemic which destroyed 14,700 men and did not abate until Aaron, the high priest, had offered up incense. The Levites alone knew how “to treat the lepra.” They isolated the patient, bathed him frequently and offered up expiatory sacrifices.

Among the Romans the practice prevailed of looking to the deities, of which, it is said, there was one for every disease and, indeed, one for every stage of every disease. As has been stated: even the itch was not without its goddess. Haggard says that The Romans were without systematized medicine, and that they had, instead, systematized superstition. Call it superstition or call it religion, the fact is that the Romans, like all other peoples of Antiquity, believed that “it is god that heals.” If it is superstition to believe that it is god that heals, and rational to believe that “it is poisons that heal,” the Romans were superstitious and the Greeks initiated the evolution of a “rational system of medicine”.

Among the Romans Febris was goddess of malaria, Scabies was goddess of the itch, Angine was goddess of quinsy, Mephitis was goddess of stench, while there were several goddesses who presided over childbirth. Juga watched over the girl throughout her courtship, Domiducus accompanied her home with her husband, Cinxia loosened her girdle, Virginensis guarded the act of deflowering, Pertinda supervised the first coition, which was pleasurable only if Volupia willed it so; after conception, Fluonia stopped the menses, and Mena, the goddess of menstruation took a journey; Rumina caused her breasts to swell, Alemona fed the embryo, Ossepaga hardened its bones,

Antevorta presided over head presentations while Postvorta looked after breech presentations; Intercidona guarded the navel, Partula fastened the binder, Vagitanus opened the infant’s mouth for its first cry, while it was taught to suckle by Educa. The Fates hovered about and if anything went wrong, Orpigena, the divine midwife, was appealed to. Directly descended from this polytheism is the polysaintism of the church, the saints taking over many of the duties formerly performed by the gods.

We may ask ourselves: did the sorcerer precede the priest or was the priest first and did the sorcerer come later? I doubt that we can give a completely satisfactory answer to this question, but, so far as history and myth reveal, the two were one from the beginning and are separated in our minds, not so much as a fact of ancient history, but as a modem innovation. It is certain that only part of the truth is contained in the statement that “myth survives in the creeds, magic in the sacraments.’’ The sorcerer is still with us and the priesthood has never surrendered its ancient prerogatives.

Let us turn to the Greeks. Of these people one medical historian says: They thought the deity could avert or cure disease. “It is Apollo or Aesculapius that heals,’’ is the Greek equivalent of David’s statement. All the rites and ceremonials of the Greek priesthood, as of the other priesthoods, were designed to gain the favor of the deity and to persuade him to heal the sick. Homer reveals that the Achaean Greeks, like other ancient peoples, thought that disease is an infliction by the deity. Agamemnon had been given, as a prize of war, the daughter of a priest of Apollo. The priest had pleaded with him to restore his daughter to his household and was rather roughly treated by Agamemnon. The priest appealed to Apollo, who became very angry over the treatment accorded his priest. In his wrath he sent a pestilence upon the Achaean army (the gods were always punishing the wrong people, as Jehovah punished the people of Egypt for the sins of Pharaoh) and the death-toll was high. In the Iliad we are told: “For he (Apollo) in anger at the king (Agamemnon) sent a sore plague upon the host, that the folk began to perish.’’

Hesiod in Works and Days, has presented us with a similar

thought:

But o'er the wicked race, to whom belong The thoughts of evil and the deed of wrong Saturnian Jove, of wide-beholding eyes,

Bids the dark signs of retribution rise:

States rue the wrongs a sinful man has done,

And all atone the wickedness of one.

The god sends down his angry plagues from high,

Famine and pestilence; in heaps they die.

He smites with barrenness the marriage bed,

And generations moulder with the dead.

The deity could send disease, he could avert disease, he could restore the sick to health*. The Achaeans were informed, by means of one of their own sooth-sayers, that: “before he (Agamemnon) gives back the maiden the god never shall drive away the pestilence.” Apollo had sent the disease upon the Achaeans and he, and he alone could heal them. So long as disease was thought of a$ an expression of the wrath of angry deities, there could be no thought of recovery through means other than those that tended to appease the wrath of the gods. Hence, Homer tells us that the Achaeans, after washing themselves in sea water, offered, with much pomp and ceremony, sacrifices and supplications to the wrathful god. “They brought a hecatomb of oxen and goats which they sacrificed near the seashore to the god Apollo, and the smell whirled in smoke heavenward.” That the smoke ascended means that, like the smoke of the sacrifices of the Jews, the sacrifice went to the god.

Dunglison tells us in his History of Medicine, of the care given to the sick at a much later date in the Asklepian temples, that they “clearly prove that all diseases were regarded as the effects of the anger of heaven, and the gods alone could consequently cure them.” He further says that the care of the sick, “closely connected with the adoration of the gods, was everywhere a species of secret and mysterious worship. Left exclusively to the priests, it was with the Egyptians as with the Greeks, with the Romans as with the Hindoos, a tissue of absurd juggleries, a system of more or less refined imposture, by the aid of which the ministers of religion amused themselves with the credulity of the profane.”

Whatever else we may think of the impostures of the priestcraft, and these were legion, I do not think that they were merely amusing themselves. Theirs was a system of exploitation everybit as despicable as the exploitation of the sick carried on today by the medical profession with its more numerous impostures. That they gave far more attention to hygienic considerations than the medical profession has ever done is certainly to their credit. In Volume 1 (page 52) of his Encyclopedia, Dr. Trail says: “The ancient priests and monks placed their patients in airy, salubrious situations, enjoined strict abstemiousness or the simplest food, gave water to drink, and prescribed sufficient washing or bathing for thorough cleanliness and then performed their magical ceremonies. Their patients recovered: ‘Nature worked the cure and the doctor got the credit.’” Except that they were priests and not “doctors” and that they gave all credit for the patient’s recovery to one of the gods, this statement is historically accurate.

In his account of what he saw and experienced in the temple, Pausanias details the extent to which the priests played upon the imaginations and credulity of the sick, to whom everything was represented as coming directly from the hands of the god. All the healing was done by the gods. A priesthood cannot practice medicine if it is the god that does the healing. Healing was not done by the substances employed in the ceremonials, whether they were herbal or animal. It is ridiculous to say that they gave “medical treatment under theurgic guise,” for they gave no medicines. They employed hygiene, which they had preserved from prehistory. Even the effort of medical historians to convert their religious ceremonials and mystic rites into forms of psychotherapy, by saying that they impressed the imaginations of the sick, is to attribute healing to the imagination, a ridiculous thing to do.

A medical historian makes the following asinine statement: “In remote antiquity he (the sick man) invoked his god; in the middle ages he touched holy relics or the hand of priest or king; from the beginning, even till today, man has placed implicit trust in the mysterious efficacy of medicine, ‘drugs.’” To thus equate man’s religious practices with medicine or drugs in an effort to provide the medical profession with an ancient pedigree is dishonesty of the worst kind. Prayers and incantations are not drugs, except in the sense that they are the “opiates of the people.”

If v/e assume the correctness of his statement that “from the beginning, even till today, man has placed implicit trust in the mysterious efficacy” of drugs, we are still faced with the question: Was his faith in drugs any more solidly based than was his faith in Apollo? Is medicine a science, as medical men persist in insisting, or is it a faith? There is the further question: If drugs are possessed of “mysterious efficacy” why is it so necessary to change from one drug to another so often? What causes their loss of efficacy?

Few ancient ideas have ceased to be believed by mankind. We shall not forget that but a few short decades ago the church sang:

Diseases are thy servants, Lord,

They go and come at thy command.

Ministers of the Gospel at funeral services were fond of quoting Job’s statement that it is God who giveth and God who taketh away. They had God killing the young and the old. It must be confessed that the idea is far from dead, even in enlightened circles. In backward regions of the earth, the idea is even more firmly held.

Chapter 11: EDEN'S GOLDEN GLOW

I want to again stress the fact that prehistory and early history constituted a continuum; there was no radical break in the ways of life of the people at the time of the invention of writing. Indeed, it is hardly likely that the invention of means of recording events, ideas and laws made more than a faint ripple on the waters of custom and convention. Prehistoric man went to bed one evening and awoke next morning to find that he had become historic man, but he made no changes in his way of life. He continued to raise the same crops, eat the same foods, live in the same old house, wear the same clothes, work at the same job, worship the same gods and rely upon the same priesthood. What he had been doing before men began to record history, he continued to do after the scribes came into being. All of this is to say that, instead of wiping the slate clean and beginning all over again, with a completely new set of institutions, a completely new set of ideas and practices, and a completely new mode of life, historic man merely continued the institutions, ideas, practices and ways of life that prehistoric man had built up.

We may logically assume that the care given the sick in the early historic period was the same care that had been given the sick in the prehistoric period. The care of the sick underwent no radical change the day history dawned. To state this a little differently, whatever care the sick had received in the prehistoric period was continued over into the historic period and was carried on for a long time parallel with any new innovations that may have originated subsequent thereto, before it was permitted, gradually, to fall into desuetude. That what man received from prehistory was a mishmash of good, bad and indifferent, of wise and foolish, of useful and nonuseful, is evident to any student of early history. Early history was late prehistory, so that only one problem confronts us: namely, how far back into prehistory are we justified in projecting what we find at the dawn of history? Myth and tradition may assist us some in answering this question, but not greatly.

There is one feature, however, of the life of man that we may safely push as far back into prehistory as we can trace man. We should not find it difficult to establish an unbroken continuity of hygienic practices from the dawn of human life on the earth to the present. We have already seen that these practices are the very warp and woof of animate existence and that at no time in his entire career could man ever have completely neglected them and continued to live. If it is not true that the Hygienic means employed by the people of different ancient nations are continuations of prehistoric practices that were common to the human race from the very beginning of human existence, why the marvelous simplicity and unity of the basic practices of all peoples?

Man may have, on occasion or under certain circumstances, ignored the need for pure air and tried to get along on polluted air; he may have wandered far from the best diet for liis requirements; he may have taken mineral instead of pure water; he may have neglected the need for sunshine or for activity or for adequate rest and sleep; he may have neglected cleanliness, etc., but he has always been forced by the very necessities of existence, to comply in some degree with the Hygienic ways of life. By his deviations from the straight and narrow path of Hygienic rectitude he has built much suffering for himself and has shortened his life, but he has never been able to completely abandon the normal ways of life, even though bidden to do so by the priest and the physician.

A study of the care the sick received in early history should provide us with a knowledge of the care they were given before the dawn of history. For obvious reasons I shall follow the record largely left us by the Greeks, supplementing this with occasional references to the care provided the sick by other peoples. Greek history begins hazily in the stone age and comes through the bronze and iron ages in a more or less unbroken line, hence we have a graphic picture of early history, which is practically identical with prehistory. At the dawn of history, what the historians insist on calling Greek medicine was a curious mishmash of (1) instinctive practices, (2) ideas and practices man had acquired from experience, these largely palliative procedures, (3) religion and magic, and (4) surgery, principally knifeless surgery.

But, to begin our story, we must go back into the hazy prehistoric period of which man’s traditions give us a blurred account. Steering as cautiously as possible between the Scylla of over reliance on tradition and the Charybdis of hypercriticism, we must follow the ancient story in brief.

Chiron is credited with first having introduced medicine into Greece, although his pupil, Asklepios, is credited with having been the first to cultivate medicine as a science and with having made it a distinct object of pursuit. Chiron, probably a prince in Thessaly, is thought to have lived in the 12th century B.C. He was seen so often on horseback that the fabulous account of his compound form, that of half horse and half man (Centaur) grew up. With the myths surrounding Chiron we are not here concerned. We are concerned only with the fact that he was the teacher of Asklepios, although the source of his medical knowledge is a deep, dark secret.

After the custom of the ancients of having their great men sired by a god and bom of a virgin, Asklepios (Latin, Aesculapius) was the son of Apollo by the virgin Coronis. When he was bom his mother left him to die, -where he was found by a shepherd boy who took him to Chiron, who reared him and taught him his knowledge of medicine. Coronis proved to be a fickle virgin and was slain by Diana, the sister of Apollo, because of her unfaithftilness. As virgin-bom sons of god were frequent in ancient populations, it is not surprising to learn that Asklepios was of such distinguished parentage. Nor should it surprise us to learn that, at a later date, there was a struggle between the devotees of Asklepios, and the Christians, to determine who was the true healer and savior—Jesus or Asklepios. The Platonic philosopher Celsus, disputed the question with Origen, the latter declaring Jesus to be the true healer. What more appropriate than that at Epidaurus, where stood one of the most famous of the Asklepian temples, which possessed an altar for sacrifices, halls in which the sick could sleep and wonder-working springs in which they could bathe, prayers are still said at one of the springs, although the light that bums there unceasingly is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and not to Asklepios. We scoff at the superstitions of ancient peoples while carrying on the same practices.

Epidaurus, the supposed birth place of Asklepios, which was located on the east coast of Peloponnesus, about thirty to forty miles south of Corinth, was the chief seat in Greece proper, of the worship of Asklepios. Here a great festival, with processions and combats, was held every five years in his honor. In Homer and Pindar, Asklepios was no god, but a hero, a cunning magician and the father of two heroes of Troy. As a magician he accompanied the other hero-gods on the Argonautic expedition. Greek writers describe him as performing magic and mesmeric procedures in his care of the sick. As Homer and Pindar do not number him among the gods, his apotheosis must have taken place long after his death. Arctinus, a successor of Homer, was one of the earliest to elevate Asklepios to the dignity of a god.

If we could divest Asklepios of all the myths that have grown up about him, we would probably find an extraordinary man. Divested of the fabulous appendages attached to him by his worshippers, he appears to have been bom at Epidaurus (some mythologists think he was certainly of Asiatic origin), to have been exposed in infancy, probably because he was an illegitimate, was accidentally discovered by a shepherd and was placed in the custody of Chiron. As we shall see later, Chiron was probably, among other things, a masseur.

Asklepios was twice married. His second wife, Lampetia, was the daughter of the sungod. He had two sons, Machaon and Podolarius, who accompanied the Greeks on the Trojan expedition. Homer’s references to them indicate that their practices were principally confined to the treatment of wounds. “Internal diseases” were still conceived of as being inflictions of the deities and were “abandoned as incurable” or were to be obviated by incantatory rites. The arts of magic formed a large part of the treatment of wounds administered by these two young men. Asklepios seems to have had several daughters, three of whom were partakers of the divine nature. There was Hygieia (health), who became the goddess of health; Panakeia (Panacea or All-healing), who became the goddess of healing; Telesphoros (fullness-bringer), who was the deity of recovery, and was usually pictured as a boy. As a boy he was the god of convalescence. There was another daughter, Alglaia (radiant virtue), who seems not to have been apotheosized.

Asklepios was deified, after his death, as the god of healing, thus supplanting, to a great extent, his father, Apollo, who was also the god of healing and who, according to some of the myths, was the one who taught the arts of healing to Asklepios. Greek myth also had a goddess of healing in addition to Panakeia. She was Artemis. This plurality of gods performing the same function is not unusual in the myths of the past. As the Greeks had more than one god of healing, so, also, they seem to have had great difficulty in deciding who it was who created the “art of healing.” It seems that each writer was at liberty to ascribe this feat to whomsoever he wished, and to ascribe to him whatever of virtues and whatever discoveries he desired. Certainly, as they were creating myths and not writing history, this seems a logical procedure. Greek writers of antiquity tell us that Chiron required of his patients that they exercise strenuously, but this practice may have been credited to him by his admirers long after his death and may not have been among his practices.

Plato and later Galen both say that Asklepios created the “art of healing,” thus robbing Chiron of credit for the doubtful creation. Poor Chiron! Some of the Greeks even robbed him of the honor of having been the teacher of Asklepios. They tell us that he was instructed in the arts of medicine by his father, Apollo, the god of healing, who instructed him in these arts from childhood. To sift the certain from the uncertain in all the mass of tradition and myth that cluster about him is not possible. Cicero (60 B.C.) credited him with having invented the catheter. This hardly seems probable. He is said to have re-united the parts of the torn body of Hippolytus and to have restored him to wholeness, perhaps the first case of organ-grafting on record. This story we may discount entirely. Early Greek writers attributed to him the things they themselves endorsed and omitted to attribute to him the things they rejected. Thus, Pindar presents chanting, internal potions, external applications and incision among his agents, while, at a much later date, Galen says he used to supplement his art with mild exercise and incantations.

His death, said to have been caused by the jealousy of Pluto, because he was rescuing too many people from the grave, would indicate that he was very successful in his care of the sick and wounded, although it seems that Pluto was angered because he was bringing back the dead to life. By his post-mortem deification, an honor conferred by the ancients upon extraordinary men and women, he became the god of healing and temples were erected to him in various parts of Hellas. Once deified, worship of him extended all over Greece and its islands and colonies.

Asklepios is represented as carrying a rod around which wound a snake, the symbol of rejuvenescence and prophecy. He was thought to frequently reveal himself as a snake and for this reason, snakes were kept in the Asklepian temples. The most common sacrifice offered to this “god of healing’’ was a cock, hence the request of Socrates, after drinking the hemlock: “Now let us sacrifice a cock to Asklepios.’’ The priests of the Asklepian temples styled themselves Asklepiadae—Sons of Asklepios. The priesthood was hereditary and their secrets were transmitted from generation to generation.

At this point it may be well to introduce another of the ancient gods. Dionysus, also known as Bacchus, among the Greeks, was also a deified man who had, according to the legend, been instrumental in rescuing the prehistoric Greeks from self-imposed ruin. The mysterious and sacred cult of Bacchus reached back into the remote prehistoric age of Greece. Deification of the great is a post-mortem honor that is often long in being bestowed. Often too, as in the case of Dionysus, the elevation to the place of honor is by degrees and not all at once. In Homer Dionysus is not one of the great divinities.

Starting as a wild man of the woods, who wandered into the midst of the Greeks at a time when they were suffering both physically and mentally, he taught them to eat fresh, uncooked foods, fresh fruits, fruit and vegetable juices, raw flesh and honey. His titles Omestes and Omophages, epithets often applied to him and to his devotees in scorn, signify raw flesh eaters. He was also called Hygiates, the healer, and Lucaios, the releaser from ills and woes.

It is noteworthy that Dionysus, whom the Greeks worshipped as their savior, was the “only begotten son of god’’ (Zeus) by Semele, and that, after he had made his divine nature known to all the world, he led his mother out of Hades, called her Thyone, and rose with her to Olympus. The recently adopted dogma of the Roman church that Mary, the mother of Jesus, did not die, but was taken bodily up to heaven, is not essentially different from this older Pagan myth. The Greeks referred to Dionysus as their Savior, Healer and Liberator.

In the course of time, other discoveries became incorporated, through tradition, in the original teachings of this genius, who had been deified, so that even the names of the later discoveries became absorbed into his own and became identified with it. Among his many titles was that of Dendrites, because he was the cultivator and protector of trees in general and of the grape vine in particular. The eating of fresh fruit was one of the earliest practices associated with his doctrines and his hygienic practices. He is credited with having introduced the Greeks to the practices of drinking fermented honey (mead) and fermented fruit juices (wine), but these practices may have come after him. Homer fails to mention him as the discoverer of wine, an omission that may be of no consequence or it may mean that, at a later date, he was credited with this discovery. It was the practice of ancient peoples to attribute discoveries and teachings to their predecessors, once a towering personality had been stamped upon the minds of their remote ancestors. The fact that the frantic orgies connected with the worship of Dionysus were introduced somewhat late in Greek history seems to me to mean that, in his earlier phase, he was not the god of wine and sexual debauchery.

Wine and mead became invested with healing virtues and, consequently, became associated with the great healer. Revered as a great healer, some of the temples devoted to Dionysus were places where people went to be healed. It is noteworthy that his healing, so far as the myth reveals, was done with uncooked food and their juices. I have not been able to unearth any information that would reveal to what extent the feeding practices of the Asklepian temples resembled those of the Dionysian temples, but I think that, in view of the great impress Dionysus made upon the remote ancestors of the Greeks and the manner in which they reverenced him, it may be taken for granted that there was considerable overlapping of the feeding practices of the two cults.

Both Asklepios and Dionysus were probably real persons around whom tradition wove many legends and with whose names subsequent events and finds were associated, just as happened sometime later with Pythagoras, who, unfortunately, was not deified. That both Dionysus and Asklepios were deified is not surprising, as the practice of deifying outstanding individuals was common in the ancient world—both prehistoric and historic. It was also common for their worshippers, lacking any authentic information about their paternity, to invest genealogies for them, usually having them bom of a virgin and sired by a god. How else account for their extraordinary characters? It is as logical to account for the extraordinary characters of Asklepios and Dionysus by having them sired by gods as to account for the great strength of Hercules, even as an infant, by having him sired by a god. At a much later period, the Latin poet-philosopher, Lucretius, must have had some such idea in mind when, in his work, On The Nature Of Things, he wrote:

From out whose breast divine still thunder forth

Those sacred utterances that sound abroad

The clear truths he has found, til it doth seem

Scarce sprung from human stock.

Fortunately for the ancients, the gods were always close at hand to serve their every need. Today, having dethroned the gods, we are forced to rely upon the operations of metaphysical and unaccommodating “laws of nature.” Is Greece better off today that Olympus is but a snow-capped peak?

To the Asklepian, rather than to the Dionysian temples must we go to discover the care the sick received at the dawn of history. The Homeric epic is said to carry the worship of Asklepios back to about one thousand B.C., but he was not an object of worship in Homer. On the other hand, the cult is supposed to have been in existence much earlier than this date. If this is true, it may mean that the practices carried on in the temples far antedate the Trojan war; in other words, they may be much older than we think. If this is true, it means that temple hygiene is truly prehistoric in origin.

The Asklepiadae or priests who presided over these temples and directed the rites and ceremonials, were, like all other sacerdotal orders of ancient times, a secret order, having a free masonry of their own. It was an exclusive order, the members of which traced their descent to their god. Fathers taught their children in this oath-bound brotherhood, and any member of the order who violated the compact suffered the penalties of the outcast.

Asklepios was worshipped in groves, in mountains and beside “medicinal” springs. 'Hie temples dedicated to him were distinguished for their healthful locations on headlands, and lofty hills and near springs. Located in salubrious surroundings, they were religio-hygienic institutions rather than medical. They were much resorted to (as sanatoria) by the sick from all over Greece. John Robertson MacArthur says in his Ancient Greece in Modern America, that the “temples of Aesculapius were found everywhere in Hellas, especially in the vicinity of hot and mineral springs. The patients were given water cures, massage and exercise. Their diet was regulated. Indeed one would say that dietetics and moral remedies were relied upon rather than drugs. Psychotherapy was undoubtedly employed... Music was also employed.” (In this connection we may recall that David employed music in an effort to remedy the madness of Saul). MacArthur adds that “around the temple (at Cos) there seems to have been a huge establishment, resembling a modem sanatorium.” Even our “dream books,” he informs us, come from the Asklepian temples, an indication that they preceded Freud in attempting to interpret dreams.

Besides the religious and magical ceremonials employed, practices were enjoined that were chiefly dietetic, with temperance, cleanliness, rest, leisure and abstinence from certain kinds of foods among the requirements. The ancient Greeks lived with the scantiest of food and clothes, in the sorriest dwellings lacking both in ventilation and sanitation, under conditions of the most severe deprivation and discomfort. A change to the temple was probably of great benefit without anything else being done.

Temples devoted to the worship of Asklepios were especially numerous in Peloponnesus. The temple at Epidaurus was the chief seat in Greece proper. In book 11, 531-M Strabo writes: “Epidaurus is not an unknown city; it is famous especially for the celebrated cures of Aesculapius, the god, who successfully cures all diseases. The temple there is crowded with sick people and its tablets there are hill of inscriptions of cures, similar to those of Cos and Trikke.” (Strabo probably used no term synonymous with the modem term cure). In Greek estimation, next to the temple at Epidaurus was the one at Pergamus, a colony from Epidaurus. Another that enjoyed a longstanding reputation was that of Trikke in Thessaly. Other famous temples were located at Delphi, Athens, Thebes, Tithoreas, Amphiaraus, Titane, Triphonium, Cerine, Croton and Smyrna, although they were to be found everywhere in classical Hellas. As a rule the temples were dedicated to Apollo, Asklepios, Hygeia, Athena, Diana, Panacea, Cnides, Juno. Anophiaraus and other deities.

The temple at Cos has become the most noted of the Asklepian temples because it is here that the legendary Father of Physic is supposed to have been a member of the Asklepiadea. Cos is a small island off the southeast comer of Asia Minor. Rhodes is close by and here existed another Asklepian temple. It is not surprising, therefore, that both these temples have been credited with having fathered the Father of Physic. In 293 B.C., the cult of Asklepios was carried to Rome by order of the Sibylline books. A much-frequented Asklepian temple was established on an island in the Tiber, which was a sort of sanitarium.

The temples were known as Asklepieia (plural), a single temple an Asklepium, and dominated Greek life for well over a thousand years, lasting into the fourth century A.D. They were seats of healing, veritable strongholds of miraculous healing, the priests being credited with miracles of healing to be compared only with those of modem “'faith cures,” such as those at Lourdes and Tinos. The Asklepiadea were miracle mongers who played upon the human imagination with ah the skill of a modem psychologist. All healing, these priests taught, was done by the god. Healing was not the direct result of their ceremonials nor of their incantations. The temples were essentially religious institutions, but they ruled the care of the sick and were mainly refugees for invalids.

But these temples were more than religious institutions. They were Hygienic institutions. In his Devils, Drugs and Doctors, Howard W. Haggard, M.D., says of the Asklepian temples: “‘The means chiefly employed for the restoration of health were sunlight, fresh air, pure water, exercise and diet,” thus revealing that the care provided in the temples was the same -means that primitive man had employed. That the Greek temples had provisions for ventilation, so that the sleepers could relax and sleep soundly, was not due to physicians.

The temples were elaborate structures, which, besides being located in salubrious surroundings, aryl in beautiful environments, were arranged to make the patient comfortable and to permit of relaxation and serenity. There were gardens, fountains, pools, and many kinds of trees and flowers. They had libraries, baths, stadiums, gymnasiums, guest chambers and comfortable beds. Robinson tells us that the temples teemed with “all the glories of Greek art—lovely Venus and laughing Bacchus, Zeus serene on his golden throne, and Aesculapius sorrowing for the ills of mankind. Fountains played in the shaded groves, and the shelter-seats were arranged in semi-circles of pure marble. And when hidden music floated over the southern flowers—the mingling of rhythm and perfume, the marriage of fragrance and melody—the sufferers raised their heads to repeat the prophecy of the Delphic Sibyl: ‘Oh Aesculapius, thou art bom to be the world’s great joy.’”

Robinson says that the Asklepian priests (strangely, he refrains from calling them physicians), were “naturally craftier than the populace” and thus they built their temples in spots favored by nature—“in the midst of a health-giving forest, by the side of a medicinal spring, on the brow of a lofty hill. The sight alone often served to bring the first smile of hope to the weary invalid.” If these priests knew enough to recognize the helpfulness of beautiful surroundings, quietness, sunshine and pure air, they were far ahead of the medical profession of today. During the last century they located their hospitals amid the tan yards, slaughter pens and other places that emitted foul stenches. Today they locate them in crowded cities, on busy streets where exist the greatest concentration of carbon monoxide and traffic noise, and they are as noisy inside as out. A modem hospital is like Grand Central Station—all noise and hubbub and is filled with smoking physicians, nurses, orderlies, patients and visitors. Soft drinks are sold on each floor and everybody guzzles these popular poisons. The stench of chemicals offends the nose, while tranquilizers substitute for quietness. It is to the eternal credit of the priests that they provided the pleasing perfumes of flowers instead of the foul stenches of drugs, and the melody of music instead of the roar of buffing machines in the halls.

These temples were health resorts, not unlike those of today, to which statesmen, celebrities, and men of wealth went in search of rest and forgetfulness. Perhaps they were unlike many “health resorts” of the present, in that they were not places where the leisurely could go to continue their drinking, smoking and other favorite indulgences. It is hardly likely, however, that the working class could afford such elaborate accommodations when ill, as those offered by the temples, and there is little reason to think that slaves ever entered these temples for care. If the temples could be patronized only by men of means, some other and less expensive means must have been employed in caring for the common people. What this was is not clear, but it may be reasonably assumed that the means of the temple found their way into every day life.

The descriptions of the healing programs conducted in the temples lead to the conclusion that these were frequented chiefly by chronic sufferers. The distances they traveled, the walks they took, the exercises they performed, the sacrifices they made, the massaging they underwent, the work of bathing in the warm and mineral springs and pools, the games and sports, and like activities could not have been carried out by acute sufferers. Patients with pneumonia and typhoid could not have undergone such care. Even the prayers they said were carried out under circumstances and in ways that the acute sufferer would not have found possible. The dietary programs, which commonly followed fasting, seem to have been designed for chronic sufferers.

Since writing the foregoing, I have come upon a statement by Pausanias that no patients severely ill and no pregnant women ready for delivery were permitted to enter the premises of the temple. It seems that late in Greek history provisions were made for the reception and care of pregnant women ready for delivery, although all deliveries were in the hands of female midwives; but there seems not to have ever been any provision made for the reception and care of severely sick acute sufferers. We have the testimony of Pausanias that “in later years, during the reign of Antoninus the Pius, a separate ward was built by him in which confinement was permitted and also the placement of the dead.” If we may judge by the throngs of men and women who patronized these temples, there was much chronic suffering in ancient Greece.

It will not be amiss to ask: What were the means of care employed in these temples to which so many hundreds of thousand of Greeks retired in perfect confidence to be freed of their illnesses? If we read only contemporary history and look only at accounts of recent accomplishments, we may easily get the idea that the past is insignificant in comparison with the present, and that our ancestors were little more than animals. The fact is that the most important truths that we possess and the most significant practices of mankind are as old as life itself and that scientific research has done little more than confirm these. This fact is especially true in the care of the sick. At the very dawn of history, the care of the sick was actually superior to what the great majority of mankind receive today when ill. In Vol. 1, page 34 of his Encyclopedia, Trail says: “The diligent student of medical history cannot fail to discover that the ancient and more ignorant practitioners were more successful in curing diseases than are the modem and wiser physicians. The remedial agents of the ancients were comparatively harmless, and, while they inspired their patients with a due degree of confidence aqd hope by the charms and ceremonials of magic and mystery, they really relied on judicious hygienic regulations to ‘aid and assist nature’ in effecting the cure. Modem intelligence repudiates the arts and incantations of a less civilized age; and in their stead has substituted the stronger potencies of modem invention, while the habits of living and thinking, with medical as with other men, have become so unnatural and artificial that, in managing disease, voluntary habits and hygienic agencies are almost wholly overlooked.”

Besides their employment of hygienic measures, we may say of the practices of the temples that these were harmless and that they were not guilty of destroying or greatly abridging human life. Although much reliance was placed in the magical arts and some mechanical supports were employed, with the application of some external measures, these often being but parts of the magian’s ceremonials, no internal “remedies” were employed. Trail stressed the fact that “we have no knowledge that Aesculapius, or his immediate successors, even conceived the idea of curing disease by drugs administered internally. Ablutions, bandages, fomentations, ointments, mechanical supports, and the application of balsamic substances, constituted their whole and their ample materia medica; and these were always employed externally.” When they employed herbs, as they sometimes did, these were applied externally and, at the outset at least, were merely elements in ceremonial or incantatory rites. They were not regarded as being possessed of healing virtues, for it was thought that only the gods could heal.

Dunglison says of the mode of care employed in the temples, that it “clearly proves that all diseases were regarded as effects of the anger of heaven; and the gods alone could consequently cure them... The ceremonials and religious customs by means of which they endeavored to obtain, as a gift from heaven the restoration of the sick, varied at different periods. They were almost all, however, especially directed, in acute and simple diseases, to the excitement of the imagination and to the re-establishment of health by very strict regimen. The entrance to the temples of Aesculapius was interdicted to all those who had not previously undergone purification.”

Although not all of the temples were erected near the sea shore and it is not likely that they all had sea water with which to purify their patients, sea water seems to have been regarded as especially potent for this purpose. Iphigenia in Touris, by Euripides, alludes to this

EDEN'S GOLDEN GLOW

temple requirement in the following lines:

The law ordain’d in reverence we must hold,

First I would cleanse them with ablutions pure;

All man’s pollutions doth the salt sea cleanse.

Whether the cleansing was regarded as a religious or a hygienic requirement is not always clear, but the sacrifices were definitely ceremonial requirements of the religious practices of the temple. The offerings—usually a cock, a young chicken, or other bird—were sacrificed to Asklepios. Sacrifices seem to have gone on in these temples as commonly as in the Temple at Jerusalem. The Greek god of healing was as bloodthirsty as the god of the Hebrews.

Dunglison lived at a time when modern Hygiene was still in its swaddling clothes. Neither he nor the other members of his profession gave any attention to the requirements of hygiene, nor did they regard it as of any special value in the care of the sick. Bleeding, puking, purging, blistering, depleting, stimulating, narcotizing—-these were the sheet-anchors of medical care. He may be excused, therefore, for thinking of “strict regimen” as a religious ritual. Even bathing in the temples, he thought of as a religious practice. Perhaps it was, as religion was then the dominant force in the lives of the people, but it was nonetheless hygienic.

In the temples fasting, continence, relaxation, games and sports, with general Hygienic care were accompanied by suggestion, “magnetic healing” and ceremonials. Ablutions, diets, sunbathes and “temple sleep,” sacrifices and prayers were all mingled in one system of care in the effort to restore health. Diet and gymnastics were employed from remote prehistoric times and it is asserted in Greek writings, even in those ascribed to Hippocrates, that therapeutics and healing were discovered as a result of man seeking to find a proper diet for the strong and the weak, for the healthy and the sick.

In the Hippocratic book entitled, On Ancient Medicine, the writer, whoever he was, traces the “discovery” of medicine to man’s search for a suitable diet. His discussion, somewhat long-winded, is based on the stupid assumption that man, unlike the lower animals, had to learn what types of foods were best for him by trial and error, and was not led instinctively to seek out and eat those foods best adapted to his alimentary wants. He pictures early man as trying to eat the diet of the ox, as suffering greatly from such a diet, and as, slowly and by painful experience, learning which foods are best for him and learning how to process, bake and prepare these foods, thus “fashioning these to the nature and powers of man.” Then he asks the ridiculous question: “To such a discovery and investigation what more suitable name could one give than that of medicine? since it was discovered for the health of man, for his nourishment and safety, as a substitute for the kind of diet by which pains, disease and deaths were occasioned.”

As the book was written in Greek and the term medicine is of later and Latin origin, there is a suspicion in my mind that the translator has followed the usual course and translated the Greek word by the term medicine, when, in the Greek, the term used probably has a different meaning.

The unknown author of the book On Ancient Medicine, held that “nobody would have sought for medicine at all, provided the same kind of diet had served with men in sickness as in good health.” He pictures what the translators call medicine as a regulation of the foods eaten to the needs and capacities of the sick man. Indeed, the whole book is largely a treatise on food, there being no references to any drugging practices. This same remark can be made with accuracy about most of the other “authentic” books of Hippocrates, except for those that are devoted to surgery.

It is unfortunate that, instead of continuing the search for the best means of feeding the sick and the well, man was shunted into a blind alley by the medical profession in its search for substances (drugs) with which to cure his ailments. Thus, instead of studying causes and effects, for over two thousand years an intensive and extensive search for cures has been carried on and this futile search is still in progress in the face of the consistent failure of the cures. Cure is a will-o-the-wisp that the profession chases over the bogs and swamps of superstition.

The temples of Cos and Cnida, and those of the other Greek colonies, gave great attention to food and natural living and devoted much of their investigations to food requirements. The writings of Euriphon, as well as those of Hippocrates, who, with all of his reliance on drugs, was never able to desert the older methods of caring for the sick, contain descriptions of diets that compare favorably with modem dietary prescriptions. A contemporary of Hipocrates who wrote on diet and sanitation, prescribing for the healthy, the sick and the convalescent, was Apollonides of Cos.

The ancient term, dietetics, should not be understood, however, in its modem sense. The medical historian, Bostock, says: “Dietetics comprehended not the regulation of diet alone, but every circumstance connected with the general management of the patient.” We may think of dietetics, in ancient practice, in about the same way that we think of Hygiene: it was a total regulation of the life of the patient. Even the word therapeutics, is not to be understood in any modem sense. To the Greeks it meant: “I wait upon, I alleviate, I attend upon the sick.” It is important for us to understand that at the time the more or less legendary Hippocrates is said to have lived and the various contradictory writings credited to him were penned, it was still thought that the best mode of caring for the sick was a regulation of the mode of life of the patient and of his food.

We find a similar thing to have been true among the Egyptians. Existing alongside the flumdummery of the priesthood was a knowledge of diet, moral living, gymnastics, and what may be called psychotherapy, although it was largely priestly ritual. Of the people of ancient India the same was true. The Indians cared for the sick largely by regimen. There was little among them that could be called medical practice. A vegetable diet, frequent bathing, with friction and brushing of the skin, were sometimes, at least at a later date than the ancient period, supplemented with blood-letting. It is probable that the bleeding practice, which was not remote in India, was borrowed from the Greeks or even from the Babylonians. It is noteworthy, also, that Celsus, an early Roman physician, who was less tinctured by Greek and Egyptian medicine than some of his successors, wrote extensively on food and its relation to health and to recovery from disease. Diet was an important factor in the care given to the sick in the Asklepian temples and there was much effort made to work out more helpful ways of eating.

Dugglison says of temple care: “In the first instance the most rigorous abstinence was enjoined. They were required to fast for several days before they could approach the cave of Charonium. At Orphus in Attica, it was required of them before consulting the oracle of Amphiacarus, to abstain from wine for three days and from every kind of nourishment for twenty-four hours.” Fasting seems to have been as important as prayers in the Asklepian temples, judging by the frequency with which it is referred to. A very strict regimen was enjoined and rigorous abstinence was necessary even before one could enter the temple. Purification fasts were practiced in the Orphic religion among the Greeks, while the Pythagoreans employed diet and fasting in their care of the sick. It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of fasting among ancient peoples.

As the Asklepian temples were devoted almost exclusively, except in later ages, to the care of chronic sufferers, the fasting employed in these temples was in chronic disease. As the practice is found in the temples at the very dawn of Greek history, it is reasonable to suppose that prehistoric man learned to employ fasting in chronic disease, in other words, that the historic practice was but a continuation of a prehistoric practice. As fasting is resorted to by both man and animals in acute disease, and as reduced eating and even fasting is instinctively resorted to by animals that are chronically ill, it seems probable that the practice of fasting in chronic disease was brought into history from the prehistoric period. At a later date, in the “Hippocratic” writings, physicians are warned not to feed patients suffering in acute disease. As the employment of fasting in acute disease certainly antedated Hippocrates by many centuries, the advice not to feed the acutely ill can hardly be regarded as original.

If the practice of fasting in chronic disease did not grow out of an instinctive aversion to food, it may have been suggested to prehistoric man by his experiences with fasting in acute illness. He may have tried the fast in chronic disease and, finding it highly beneficial, adopted it as a result of this experiment. There is also the possibility that enforced abstinence, ^s in famine, that was not too prolonged, revealed to our prehistoric ancestors that fasting in chronic disease is of great benefit. An experience of this kind would have been somewhat like the prolonged abstinence on board ship, such as that described by Mark Twain in My Debut As a Literary Person, which abstinence proved remedial in the cases of chronic disease among the sailors.

I incline, however, to the view, that fasting in chronic disease at that early period, was the outgrowth of instinctive practices and drives. One of the most common complaints of chronically ill patients is that of “loss of appetite.” They complain that foods do not taste good, that everything they eat “turns to gas,” that every meal is followed by increased discomfort and pain and that they are more comfortable when they do not eat. If we may assume that our ancestors were accustomed to being guided more than are we by the language of their senses, we may take it for granted that experiences such as these would have caused them to abstain from eating, Like the animals below us, they would not eat when in a state of discomfort.

The fact that temple fasting was mingled with religion no more proves that it was, originally, a religious rite than does the fact that the temples also employed rest and exercise in their care of the sick proves that these normal needs of life were originally merely religious rites. We know that men have frequently incorporated their strongest convictions in their religions and religion has preserved for us many of the earliest practices of man. The sacred writings of all peoples abound with rules, precepts and maxims, etc., that have been handed down, in most instances, from remote antiquity, in many instances, we are certain, from prehistory. Religion preserved and did not create them.

The ancients had few poison-vices. Perhaps each nation had one or two, but never the generous collection of poison-habits seen in modem life. Tea and coffee were unknown to most of the world; chocolate was unknown outside of South America and Mexico and tobacco was known only to the Americans, soft drinks were unheard of anywhere. Most other drug habits were unknown in the days of early history and prehistory. Wine does seem to have been widely used, but there is much evidence that its harmfulness was understood, as the repeated warnings against its employment as a beverage, that are contained in the Bible and other ancient religious literature as well as in the writings of the philosophers attest. Its ceremonial employment was probably the origin of its employment as a beverage, for it is

difficult to understand how the undepraved taste of ancient man could have been induced to take the foul-tasting beverage, had not some powerful psychological influence intervened.

Dunglison tells us that “it was required before consulting the oracle of Amphiaraus, to abstain from wine for three days and from every kind of nourishment for twenty-four hours. At Pergamus this abstinence from wine was equally necessary in order that the ether of the soul, as Philostratus expresses it, might not be sullied with the liquor.” Similar requirements for abstinence from liquor, both before entering the temple and after admission were in force.

Exercise was employed in the temples. Dunglison says that “frequently there were at the side of the temples gymnasia, where persons laboring under chronic disease recovered their strength by the use of gymnastics, and of baths and unctions.” The Greeks and Romans knew the importance of exercise long before there was a medical profession. Herodicus is credited with having invented gymnastics, but exercise was employed long before the invention of formal gymnastics. Pythagoras stressed the importance of cleanliness, exercise and proper food long before the time of Hippocrates. In the temples exercise was employed, not alone for its hygienic value, but also, in deformities and defects, for its corrective value. By the time of Plato, movements had been classified as active and passive and both types of movements were employed in the correction of spinal curvature.

The stress placed upon physical exercise in the temples is in striking contrast with its almost total neglect by modem physicians, who prefer to prescribe drugs to regulating the lives of their patients in conformity with the needs of organic existence. Even in muscular atrophy they prescribe drugs and neglect exercise.

Rest and relaxation were depended upon in the temples and it is certain that the Hippocratic writings borrowed their emphasis upon rest from this source. The temple, on the other hand, may be logically assumed to have borrowed rest and relaxation from the practices of prehistory, as they are integrals of the normal needs of organic existence. Man certainly rested and relaxed before there was a priest or a temple. Leisure time for rest and relaxation was provided in the temples and efforts were made to keep the sick in a pleasant state of mind.

Sunbathing, like formal gymnastics, is a substitute for the normal way of life that was followed by man at an earlier period. The practice can hardly be thought of as having been a part of the way of life of primitive man, for living nude and in the sun much of the day, he would have no need for sunbathes. On the other hand, it may be that, on cloudy days, when there was sun only at brief intervals, he may have taken sun baths, even in remote primitive ages. When we

find sunbathing employed in the temples, we may think of these as substitutes for the normal way of life that had been previously carried out by the ancestors of the Greeks. The helioses (L. solaria) and sunbathing practices connected with the Asklepian temples, the sunbathing that was connected with the gymnasia, and the sunbathing of the philosophers may be properly regarded as a continuation of the life in the sun that our forefathers knew. It may be taken for granted, I think, that these practices and the provisions for them, antedate the beginning of recorded history and that they came into being after man had learned to wear clothes, build cities and live in houses.

In the temples sacrifices, prayers, fasting and ablutions all went along together. The temples were commonly located near a spring that supplied an abundance of water, for bathing and cleanliness were strictly enjoined in these institutions. Indeed, as in the case of the oracles, patients were required to bathe before they could enter the temple. After a thorough cleansing, the entrant anointed himself with aromatic spirits or with oils. Some of the springs near which temples were erected were mineral springs and it has been supposed that the Greeks thought of their waters as healing waters. This seems hardly likely, as all healing was done by the gods. It is probable that they merely made use of the springs that were available. Any idea that mineral waters have medicinal qualities must have originated later.

As late as 1850 The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, in an editorial on “The Abuses of Bathing,” said: “In our opinion, once a week is often enough to bathe the whole body, for purposes of luxury and cleanliness. Beyond this we consider bathing injurious.” This was at a time when physicians had such a morbid fear of water that they not only did not use it for cleanliness, but denied it to fever patients to drink. They were so afraid of the injurious effects of water, that they rejected even the most rudimentary cleanliness in their care of patients.

It is instructive to note that at this time, when physicians were wrestling with puerperal fever and had a high death-rate from this cause in their lying-in women, the Hygienists and hydropaths never mention such a complication and deaths from this cause in their parturient women. With their washings before and during delivery, their syringing of the vagina after delivery, together with their clean hands, they prevented infection.

If there was a Hippocrates of Cos and if he was a priest in the Asklepian temple there, he brought over into the practice of medicine, which he is alleged to have fathered, many of the practices of the temple. If he is a mere figment of the imagination of Plato or a fictional character he invented to serve as a type, it is still true that many of the temple practices are embodied in the mass of anonymous writings that have been attributed to Hippocrates. It is interesting to note that in the Hippocratic work entitled The Physician, there is insistence upon

absolute cleanliness of hands and instruments in the operating room, a demand that must have come from the temple, where the cleanliness had long prevailed. Contrast this ancient practice with the following graphic description of surgical practices of but a short time ago, as given be Sir Frederick Treves, in a discussion, in The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, of the London hospitals at the time he began his practice: “There was no object in being clean. Indeed cleanliness was out of place. It was considered to be finicking and affected. An executioner might as well manicure his nails before chopping off a head. The surgeon operated in a slaughter house, suggesting frock coat of black cloth. It was stiff with blood and filth of years. The more sodden it was, the more forcibly did it bear evidence of the surgeon’s prowess. I, of course, commenced my surgical career in such a coat, of which, I was quite proud. Wounds were dressed with ‘charpie’ soaked in oil. Both oil and dressings were frankly and exultingly septic. ‘Charpie’ was a species of cotton waste obtained from cast linen. It would probably now be discarded by a motor mechanic as being too dirty for use on a car. I remember a whole ward as being decimated by hospital gangrene. The modem student has no knowledge of this disease. He has never

THE MYTH OF MEDICINE

Herbert M. Shelton

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