f, except that they were invisible, who
operated practically the whole of natural phenomena. There was a spirit
for every place and every happening; spirits for fields and hearths,
thresholds and springs. Some of them were friendly, some of them
naturally unfriendly, but they were everywhere in existence, everywhere
in action and naturally if they were unfriendly they would from time to
time and in various most curious ways get into the body itself and there
do any amount of mischief.

The priest-doctor's task, therefore, was to get them out. He might scare
them out, or scold them out, or pray them out, or trick them out. He
would use his medicine as much to make the place of their temporary
abode uncomfortable for the demon as remedial for the patient and,
indeed, the curious and loathsome things which have been used for
medicines might well disgust even a malevolent demon. One thing stands
out very clearly and that is that whatever the medicine did or left
undone, it worked through its influence upon the mind of the patient and
not through any real medicinal value.

_The Beginnings of Scientific Medicine_

Of course along with all this would go a kind of esoteric wisdom which
was part of the stock in trade of the healer. There were charms,
incantations and magic of every conceivable sort. The medicine man of
uncivilized or even half-civilized peoples really makes medicine for the
mind rather than the body. There were, however, gleams of scientific
light through all this murky region. The Egyptians knew something of
anatomy though they made a most capricious use of it and there must have
been some knowledge of hygienic methods; the prohibitions of Leviticus,
for example, and of the Jewish law generally for which the Jew must have
been, as far as medical science is concerned, somewhat in debt to the
Egyptian and the Chaldean, really have sound hygienic reasons behind
them. The Greeks began with demons but they ended with something which
approached true science.

The real contribution of Greece, however, seems to have been on the
positive rather than the negative side. They made much of health as an
end in itself, had gods and goddesses of physical well-being. The Greek
had constantly held before him such an ideal of physical excellence as
had never before been approached and has never since been equalled. He
seems to have been abstemious in eating; he practiced the most strenuous
physical exercises; he lived a who