Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1929-02-03

table to change their luck; Wall Street
financiers crowding the waiting room of
we'll known aStrologer to find out If
the stars are propitious for a rise in
their favorite stock the thirteenth floor
omitted from nearly every large hotel.
These may all be described as vestigial
methods of thinking, relics left over
from former age. The body is full of
such veStiges, such as the appendix, and
so is the mind, fact of which the pat
ent medicine charlatan and the healer
are well aware. Just as the savage
woman believed that the mothers cloak
could impart the quality of fertility,
people of today think that red wine Is
good for those who are pale and that
raw meat will give courage or strength
to those who eat it. A whole race be-
lieves in the healing virtues of the
a human being.
The thinking processes back of these
manifestations are not essentially diff
ferent from those of the author of
MY Long-Lost Friend" who recon-
mends that tuberculosis be cured by
muttering the following formula over
the afflicted person:
Consumption, order thee out of the
bones into the flesh. out of the flesh
upon the skin, out of the skin into the
wilds of the forest"
THERE was, not long ago-and may
still be-in Shanghai hospital
whose management was, to say the least,
broadminded. In it an invisible but
very real dividing line separated the
two halves of a large dormitory. On
one side of this line were all the. ad-
juncts of modern medicine-European
and American doctors, trained nurses,
equipment for blood TRANSMISSION, X-ray,
and so forth
On the other side Chinese doctors
presided and practiced their ancient
arts.
The behavior of many of the natives
who came to this hospital was charac-
teristic, to certain degree, of the re-
action of all of us to disease. They first
gave themselves over to the foreign
physicians and their newfangled and
perhaps sensible notions. If a rapid
improvement followed, we'll and good:
the white devils were smart But if
weeks dragged by and the patients felt
no better, one by one they would drift
to the other side Of the ROOM
1t is easy to drop back into primitive
thinking when scientific facts learned
later in the life of the individual or in
the history of the race do not seem to
work. Because these ideas are the last
acquired, they are the least stable and
the ones often most easily sloughed off.
The kind of ailments which are taken
to fake medical practitioners and to
powwow doctors are frequently those
which have been pronounced incurable
by authentic physicians, or whose course
of cure is slow or diff1cult-such Attic
lions as cancer, goiter or tuberculosis.
Practically all of us, even the most
world-weary, really want to live, want
to live passionately; faced with death
despaired of by science, we will turn to
any charlatan who will promise to cure
us, feeling that he can do us no harm
and may do us good.
X X \ X
TN dealing with people such as the
principals in the York tragedy the
powwow doctor has a water-tight alibi
The regular doctor may succeed or he
may not. If he fails, it is usually be-
cause of some complicated scientific
condition which he does not explain to
his patient and which the patient would