CAPE ARGUS - 1939,
January 14
In his talk
this week Medicus deals with superstition in medicine and the healing power of
faith.
“There is
nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” is one of those gems of
wisdom which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of his characters, this time
Hamlet, and it is especially true in the world of medicine. Or put it thus: “Believe
a thing is so, and it is apt to become so.”
But there are
beliefs and beliefs. One is faith which is well-founded, whether in a
supernatural force, a friend or a physician; the is not so well-founded,
amounting simply to a belief that what we greatly desire must happen.
There are
also not a few people who, as Burton says in his famous “Anatomy of Melancholy,”
almost seem to believe more in a thing the more incredible it is, who like to
think that the impossible may happen in their case.
Now all those
beliefs, we, as doctors encourage up to the hilt. Someone has said that
patients think much more of their doctor than they do of his prescriptions so
that his mixtures, pills and powders derive most of their value, from the fact
that it is he who prescribes them.
I am not so
sure of that, and confess that I myself, when a doctor refused to order me a
mixture because he thought all I needed was more exercise, begged him to give
me a bottle. And, wise man, he finally yielded, saying with a smile: “All
right, here you are if it will give you faith,” and wrote out a prescription.
THAT
BOTTLE
I also know
how much happier patients leave a surgery or a consulting room when they can
hug to their bosoms a bottle, or a prescription with almost as many drugs in it
as bullets in a shrapnel shell, one of which is sure to hit the mark.
And the
prescription, too, is written in dog-Latin and its quantities set down in
almost cabalistic signs which came down from the Middle Ages.
I often
wonder why we adhere to this medieval custom. Is it that the mysterious looms
large, and that men, women perhaps more so, have a greater faith in the things
they cannot understand? At any rate it is the best, as an old writer said, that
mystery leads millions by the nose, and that even today superstition lurks deep
in the hearts of minds of many even intelligent folks.
SUPERSTITION
RIFE
Certainly, in
old-time medicine superstition ran rife, as the weird prescriptions unearthed
on clay tablets from Babylon, Nineveh and Ancient Egypt show. But it does come
with a surprise to learn that in the seventeenth century an ointment composed
of the pulverized flesh of an Egyptian mummy, most scraped from the bones of
executed criminals, bull’s blood and herbs collected in graveyards at a certain
phase of the moon, was used by the great surgeons of Europe for 100 years. Lord
Bacon, the man who not a few people think wrote the works of Shakespeare,
believed in that ointment.
There was
also the Sympathetic Powder, believed in by not only the Stuart kings and by
distinguished learned men, such as Descartes, but also the foremost surgeons
and doctors of that time. It did not cure by direct application to the wounded
patient. All that was required was to get one of his blood-stained garments,
soak them in a solution of the powder and, lo and behold, some mysterious
emanations passed to the patient lying quite a distance off, and healed his
wound. You may smile at this, but you cannot smile at the men who believed it.
Here is another man whom you cannot ridicule, namely John Wesley, whose name
men of all creeds and faiths united recently to commemorate.
Yet in a book
entitled “Primitive Medicines or an Easy and Natural Method of Curing Many
Diseases,” we find the following passage:
“The fasting
spittle outwardly applied every morning has sometimes relieved and sometimes
cured blindness, corns, deafness, and warts.”
Here, too,
was his cure for cancer, namely cold bath:
“This cured Mrs.
B. of a cancer in her breast, of consumption, sciatica, and rheumatism which
she had nearly 20 years. She bathed daily for a month and drank only water.”
CANCER
CURES
That was 200
years ago, but when the American Society for the Control of Cancer offered £10
000 for a cure for that disease, 4 000 people of this twentieth century sent in
co-called cures.
Not one of
them came within an ace of securing the award; but I give a list of some of
them in the hope that should any of my readers believe in any one of them they
will not any longer waste valuable time on so-called cures, but go right off
for early treatment by radium, X-rays, etc. – cures which have saved thousands
and thousands of lives.
An
outstanding suggestion was to catch a green-striped European frog, toast it in
butter, rub it into a powder, and use the butter for a salve. Variants of this
cure were to apply a live frog or crab or two to the growth till they died, or
hold a live mole in the hand until it died, or to apply powdered centipede.
Others were
to eat salt herrings, everything but the head, to drink water from a blacksmith’s
cooling tub, never to eat anything grown by artificial manure, or with worms,
to apply a hot torch, or lead with holes in it, petroleum, candle-grease or pig’s
fat with sulphate of copper, onion-juice, turpentine, nicotine snails,
spider-webs, horse-blood, goat’s milk, oil of cloves, blue clay, pepsin,
pipe-amber, and carbonic snow.
Vegetable
remedies used were acorn coffee, calendula flowers, cinnamon-tea, garlic,
sorrel, cranberries, lobelia, red clover, hemlock, wild parsnip, willow-sap,
sawdust and salt, chestnut powder, and saliva, phytolacca and pondlily roots.
Many of these
are used to this day, despite their absolute uselessness. There were also cures
alleged to have been made by chemicals, mechanical means, religion,
spiritualism, and mystical rites.
RHEUMATISM
Rheumatism
has afflicted man for thousands of years, and it is to be expected that it has
given rise to a host of superstitious remedies, weird or gruesome, reinforced
by charms, amulets and incantations, as I have described elsewhere.
But let us
come down to the Christian era, say about 1 000 A.D. Then a pilgrim from the
Holy Land brought back the anti-rheumatic finger-ring, belief in which was to
survive to this very day, Indeed, in USA those rings of iron or polished steel
are being worn by thousands of matter-of-fact business men who believe that the
rust formed on them shows the rheumatic poison is being extracted.
Others pin
their faith on a tight copper wire worn round the waist. The ring is worn, of
course, on the fourth or wedding-ring finger. The ancients believed that this
finger had a special nerve running straight to the heart, and Roman doctors
used to stir their heart-medicines with it to make doubly sure.
WART TRICK
English
country folk to this day believe that if you stroke a wart or stye with a
wedding ring it will vanish immediately. That is better than the other ways of
having the stye licked by a dog or struck nine times by a tom-cat’s tail.
And of
course, we all know of folk who carry a potato or horse-chestnut in their
trouser pocket for their rheumatism and swear by it.
Clearly, the,
superstition still survives among us. True, sensible people no longer have a
belief in charms and incantations, but it seems to me that what has taken their
place is a pathetic and almost superstitious belief in the virtue of printed
testimonials regarding, say, remedies from a sacred herb.
There is a
curious instance of such an American preparation which attained a phenomenal
sale purely through testimonials, no doubt genuine, from persons who believed
it had cured them of almost every disease under the sun, from bow-legs and flat
foot to diabetes, Bright’s disease and cancer. Yet, it was only sugar and
water.
Another
preparation, containing only olive oil, alcohol and water, brought glowing
testimonials from blind folk saying that they actually seemed to be growing new
eyes.
SACRED
REMEDIES
No, do not
mistake me. All secret remedies are not frauds and quite a number of them contain
valuable drugs. All I can say is that testimonials are not proof. I can show
you how that can be from my own experience in practice. I was once asked to
prescribe for insomnia, and my dispenser by mistake sent a coloured mixture of
Epsom salts. The patient wrote saying it was the most wonderful sleep-bringer
she had ever had, and so glowing a testimonial did she give regarding it to her
neighbours that my stock of Epsom salts ran out.
Here is
another typical case: A patient’s hair was falling out to the extent of
baldness. It was a case which would recover of itself, and I explained this,
but the patient insisted on treatment. I gave it and the hair returned as
luxuriant as ever, with the result that another glowing testimonial to the
wonderful treatment arrived and as the news went around, a host of such cases
turned up.
THE LESSON
I explained
that no two cases were alike, and that where the hair papillae were dead, no
treatment on earth would make the hair grow again. But it was no use. “Mrs…. had
been cured by my treatment and would I give them the same?” So, I gave in, and
the result was that out of well-nigh on 100 cases receiving the same treatment
about six were cured and wrote me a letter of glowing thanks, while the other
94 I suppose must have been failures as I never heard from them.
This is the
lesson – that, testimonials or not, what cures one person may not cure, or even
may harm another. Yet another lesson is that Post hoc is not always Propter hoc
– that is, that it may be Time and not our medicines which heals. This can be
put in another way. One individual may have in his or her body a more potent
Vis medicatrix naturae or inherent healing power than another.
To believe
that the same drug can cure the same disease in every individual is nothing else
than the grossest superstition, even though it is a common one in these
enlightened days.
