Before the means which nature and art have put in the hands of the
medical practitioner can be fairly brought into use, the prejudices of
the vulgar must be overcome, the intrusions of false philosophy must be
fenced out, and the partnership with the priesthood dissolved. All this
implies that freedom and activity of thought which belong only to the
most advanced conditions of society; and the progress towards this is by
gradations as significant of wide-spread changes, as are the varying
states of the barometer of far-extended conditions of the atmosphere.
Apart, then, from its special and technical interest, my subject has a
meaning which gives a certain importance, and even dignity, to details in
themselves trivial and almost unworthy of record. A medical entry in
Governor Winthrop's journal may seem at first sight a mere curiosity;
but, rightly interpreted, it is a key to his whole system of belief as to
the order of the universe and the relations between man and his Maker.
Nothing sheds such light on the superstitions of an age as the prevailing
interpretation and treatment of disease. When the touch of a profligate
monarch was a cure for one of the most inveterate of maladies, when the
common symptoms of hysteria were prayed over as marks of demoniacal
possession, we might well expect the spiritual realms of thought to be
peopled with still stranger delusions.
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