The Greatest Benefit to Mankind. Roy Porter

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СКАЧАТЬ was so very apposite to this particular case, that I could not help applying it; and that this might be the intention of Providence here, I must own had some little weight with me.

      Maintaining health required understanding one’s body. This was both a simple matter (pain was directly experienced) and appallingly difficult, for the body’s interior was hidden. Unable to peer inside, popular wisdom relied upon analogy, drawing inferences from the natural world. Domestic life gave clues for body processes – food simmering on the hob became a natural symbol for its processing in the stomach – while magic, folksong and fable explained how conception and birth, growth, decay and death mirrored the seedtime and the harvest. The landscape contained natural signs: thus peasant women made fertility shrines out of springs. To fathom abnormalities and heal ailments, countryfolk drew upon the suggestive qualities of strange creatures like toads and snakes (their distinctive habits like hibernation or shedding skins implied a special command over life and death), and also the evocative profiles of landscape features like valleys and caves, while the phases of the moon so obviously correlated with the menstrual cycle.

      Nature prompted the idea that the healthy body had to flow. In an agrarian society preoccupied with the weather and with the changes of the seasons, the systems operating beneath the skin were intuitively understood as fluid: digestion, fertilization, growth, expulsion. Not structures but processes counted. In vernacular and learned medicine alike, maladies were thought to migrate round the body, probing weak spots and, like marauding bands, most perilous when they targeted central zones. Therapeutics, it was argued, should counter-attack by forcing or luring ailments to the extremities, like the feet, where they might be expelled as blood, pus or scabs. In such a way of seeing, a gouty foot might even be a sign of health, since the big toe typically afflicted was an extremity far distant from the vital organs: a foe in the toe was trouble made to keep its distance.

      In traditional medicine, as I have said, health is a state of precarious balance – being threatened, toppled and restored – between the body, the universe and society. More important than curing is the aim of preventing imbalance from occurring in the first place. Equilibrium is to be achieved by avoiding excess and pursuing moderation. Prevention lies in living in accord with nature, in harmony with the seasons and elements and the supernatural powers that haunt the landscape: purge the body in spring to clean it of corrupt humours, in summer avoid activities or foods which are too heating. Another preventative is good diet – an idea encapsulated in the later advice, ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’. Foods should be consumed which give strength and assimilate natural products which, resembling the body, are beneficial to it, such as wine and red meat: ‘meat makes flesh and wine makes blood’, runs a French proverb. The idea that life is in the blood is an old one. ‘Epileptic patients are in the habit of drinking the blood even of gladiators,’ noted the Roman author Pliny (AD C. 23–79): ‘these persons, forsooth, consider it a most effectual cure for their disease, to quaff the warm, breathing, blood from man himself, and, as they apply their mouth to the wound, to draw forth his very life.’

      Clear-cut distinctions have frequently been drawn between ‘science’ and ‘superstition’ but, as historians of popular culture today insist, in societies with both a popular and an elite tradition (high and low, or learned and oral cultures), there has always been complex two-way cultural traffic in knowledge, or more properly a continuum. While often aloof and dismissive, professional medicine has borrowed extensively from the folk tradition.

      Take, for instance, smallpox inoculation. There had long been some folk awareness in Europe of the immunizing properties of a dose of smallpox, but it was not until around 1700 that this knowledge was turned to use. The first account of artificial inoculation was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1714, and widespread publicity was achieved thanks to the observations of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), wife of the British consul in Constantinople, that Turkish peasant women routinely performed inoculations. One English country doctor who practised inoculation was Edward Jenner. In his native Gloucestershire it was also known in the farming community that there was a disease of cattle – cowpox – which was occasionally contracted by human beings, particularly dairy-maids who milked the cows. This led Jenner to the idea behind vaccination; elite medicine clearly had much to learn from folk tradition.

      We must thus avoid taking for granted the antagonistic presence of two distinct traditions: the scientific and the superstitious, the right and the wrong. In all complex societies there have been various ways of thinking about the body, health and disease. In early modern Europe there was nothing mutually exclusive about different types of therapeutics or styles of healing. The English parson-physician, Richard Napier (1559–1634), was a graduate of Oxford University and a learned scholar. Yet he was also an exponent of religious healing: he would pray for the recovery of his patients, and to protect them ‘against evil spirits, fairies, witcheries’ he would also give them protective sigils and amulets to wear, as well as purges. And when the diarist Samuel Pepys (1633 – 1703), who later became president of the Royal Society of London, surveyed his health and found himself in exceptionally good condition, he was unsure of the cause. On 31 December 1664, he balanced his books for the year:

      So ends the old year, I bless God with great joy to me; not only from my having made so good a year of profit, as having spent £420. and laid up £540 and upward.

      But I bless God, I never have been in so good plight as to my health in so very cold weather as this is, nor indeed in any hot weather these ten years, as I am at this day and have been these four or five months. But I am at a great loss to know whether it be my Hare’s fote, or taking every morning a pill of Turpentine, or my having left off the wearing of a gowne.

      As this suggests, for Pepys as for others, religion, magic and medicine coalesced for therapeutic ends. Bread baked on Good Friday would never go mouldy; if stored, it would treat all manner of disease; rings made out of silver collected at the Eucharist would cure convulsions; the sacrament of confirmation would ward off sickness. Such beliefs had been encouraged within the proliferating healing rites of medieval Catholicism. In Protestant countries, with the anathematizing of pilgrimages, relics, holy waters, invocation of saints and the like at the Reformation, similar rituals continued, though essentially without express ecclesiastical authorization.

      Medical magic was accepted by the unlettered and the elite alike until at least the seventeenth century, and was thought to operate in many ways. Disease could be transferred, transplanted or transformed. A sick person should boil eggs in his own urine and then bury them; as the ants ate them, the disease would also be eaten up. To heal a swollen neck, one was to draw a snake along it, put the snake in a tightly corked bottle and bury it; as the snake decayed, the swelling would go. Similarly, whooping cough sufferers should stand on the beach at high tide; when the tide went out, it carried the cough with it. Warts might be treated by touching them with a pebble; the pebbles were placed in a bag which was ‘lost’ as the sufferer went to church. Whoever found the bag acquired the warts too.

      It was also widely believed that disease could be transferred to the dead. The sick person should clutch a limb of someone awaiting burial; the disease would then leave his or her body and enter the corpse. This mode of magic explains why mothers crowded around a scaffold, struggling to get their sickly infants into contact with an executed felon’s body.

      The doctrine of signatures linking humans and nature, microcosm and macrocosm, was of course interwoven with astrology – a learned science as well as a popular belief. Understanding of the heavens was seen as providing the key to the particular properties of herbs and minerals. Plants governed by Venus, herbalists explained, were aids to fertility and childbirth; those under Mars provided strength, and the moon played a crucial part.

      Above all, magic functioned with religion in popular healing. Christianity endorsed an articulate symbolic cosmology which asserted the supreme potency of non-material forces. Roman Catholicism etched onto believers’ minds the notion of miracle cures and the healing powers СКАЧАТЬ