The Evolution of Modern Medicine: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman Foundation, in April, 1913 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Evolution of Modern Medicine: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman Foundation, in April, 1913

To primitive man life seemed full of sacred presences (walter Pater) connected with Obj ects in nature, or with incidents and epoch in life, which he began early to deify, so that, until a quite recent period, his story is largely associated with a pantheon Of greater and lesser gods, which he has manufactured wholesale. Xenophanes was the earliest philosopher to recognize man's practice Of making gods in his own image and endowing them with human faculties and attri butes; the Thracians, he said, made their gods blue-eyed and red haired, the Ethiopians, snub-nosed and black, while, if oxen and lions and horses had hands and could draw, they would represent their gods as oxen and lions and horses. In relation to nature and to disease, all through early history we find a pantheon full to repletion, bearing testimony no less to the fertility Of man's imagination than to the hopes and fears which led him, in his exodus from barbarism, to regard his gods as pillars Of fire by night, and pillars Of cloud by day.

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