firm in his resolution, the doctor
decided to take his offer directly to the natives. Most received
him with laughter, contempt, or violence; many ignored him; a few
beat him up; some said he just wanted to get at their firewood;
most said they, like the chief, felt fine. But a dozen or so
natives came to him privately where he had been tossed into the
bushes after his most recent beating, and asked him for the medicine.

"We are somehow not really happy living like this," they said, "even
though it is the way of the world." The doctor gladly gave them the
medicine, and in a few days they began to show remarkable signs of
recovery. No longer desiring to eat dirt or jump out of trees, these
natives corrected their diet, improved in health, and began to apply
themselves to such activities as making baskets, repairing their huts,
caring for their children, and gathering food. Some even began to
question the wisdom of collecting stacks of wood more than twenty
feet high.

Such wild, unusual, and anti-social behavior did not go unnoticed by
the other natives, who quickly ostracized the cured natives from the
tribal camp, calling them enemies of the current system. And even
though many of the delirious natives began to suspect that the cured
natives were somehow better off than they, and that there might be
more to living than sleeping on dunghills and finding new trees to
jump out of, resistance to the cure was strong. First, almost all
the educated and respectable people--the chief and his council--spoke
against it, and the example of their sophistication and wealth (the
chief's woodpile was ninety feet high) was very strong. Many others,
from the gossips to the wise man, said that the old way was right,
and that the tribe had always behaved that way. There were few real
individuals in the tribe, so that even though scores would have been
glad to try the cure, they were afraid to stand against the rest and
did what everyone else was doing, which was nothing.

The witch doctor had a stronger argument against the new regimen. He
pointed out that the cure was harder to take than the cures he
dispensed. The Eastern doctor's cure was painful, and though many of
the witch doctor's cures caused vomiting, hives, convulsions, and
hallucinations, the natives were all familiar with these effects and
attributed them to swallowing the medicine wrong, rather than to the
medicine itself. But who knew what the fate of the cu