would have been alive still
if it weren't for that nasty Mrs. Jones: she put him into a pair of damp
sheets." Or, "My husband would never have caught the cold that killed
him, if that horrid man Brown hadn't kept him waiting so long in the
carriage at the street corner." The doctor has to bear the brunt of most
such complaints; indeed, it is calculated by an eminent statistician
(who desires his name to remain unpublished) that eighty-three per cent.
of the deaths in Great Britain might easily have been averted if the
patient had only been treated in various distinct ways by all the
members of his family, and if that foolish Dr. Squills hadn't so grossly
mistaken and mistreated his malady.

The fact is, the death is regarded as a misfortune, and somebody must be
blamed for it. Heaven has provided scapegoats. The doctor and the
hostile female members of the family are always there--laid on, as it
were, for the express purpose.

With us in modern Europe, resentment in such cases seldom goes further
than vague verbal outbursts of temper. We accuse Mrs. Jones of
misdemeanours with damp sheets; but we don't get so far as to accuse her
of tricks with strychnine. In the Middle Ages, however, the pursuit of
the scapegoat ran a vast deal further. When any great one died--a Black
Prince or a Dauphin--it was always assumed on all hands that he must
have been poisoned. True, poisoning may then have been a trifle more
frequent; certainly the means of detecting it were far less advanced
than in the days of Tidy and Lauder Brunton. Still, people must often
have died natural deaths even in the Middle Ages--though nobody believed
it. All the world began to speculate what Jane Shore could have poisoned
them. A little earlier, again, it was not the poisoner that was looked
for, but his predecessor, the sorcerer. Whoever fell ill, somebody had
bewitched him. Were the cattle diseased? Then search for the evil eye.
Did the cows yield no milk? Some neighbour, doubtless, knew the reason
only too well, and could be forced to confess it by liberal use of the
thumb-screw and the ducking-stool. No misfortune was regarded as due to
natural causes; for in their philosophy there were no such things as
natural causes at all; whatever ill-luck came, somebody had contrived
it; so you had always your scapegoat ready to hand to punish. The
Athenians, indeed, kept a small collection of public scapegoats always
in stock, waiting to be sacrificed at a mome