Medicine is Voodoo - Dr. Herbert M. Shelton

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Medicine is Voodoo

Herbert M. Shelton

Dr Shelton's Hygienic Review

 

The generally accepted view of our modern world is that we have definitely

broken with the past, Ours is a new world, new age, with new concepts, new

principles and a totally new outlook upon the universe and life around us.

Few of us, perhaps, realize how little we have broken with the past; we do

not realize how much of that past is still with us, forming a part of us,

helping to shape our conduct, to determine our thinking and to condition our

reactions in general. Few of us are aware of the extent to which vestiges of

savage culture, which have survived from the shadowy and uncertain ages of

pre-history, still dominate our thought and conduct.

 

The most characteristic feature of prehistoric culture was its use of

magic or witch-craft. Magic has, indeed, been called the science of the

savage. By magic, that is, by the use of rites, ceremonials, prayers, dances,

brews, moths, concoctions, and mystic symbols, etc., the savage magi sought

to control the forces of nature.

 

By the use of his magic, the shaman, or medicine man, warded off

pestilence, cured disease, prevented floods and droughts, saved the sun from

destruction when in an eclipse, assured good crops, plenty of game, an

abundance of babies and, in general protected and provided for the people of

the tribe. He even used his magic to assure victory in war.

 

Sex was used for magical purposes, The sex-orgy, which is thought to have

been practiced universally, was one of the most firmly established

ceremonials of archaic culture. It was a fertility rite and was thought to

influence the fertility both of food-animals and of the soil. It helped to

assure good crops,

 

Women were taught that it was holy to submit themselves to the sexual

embraces of the Horned God, or rather with his masked magician-priest, to

encourage procreation of food-animals. Sacred or religious prostitution grew

up in the same way, Prostitution now a sordid commercial affair, had its

origin in what is today called religion.

 

The savage use of sex as witchcraft, growing as it did, out of food

anxieties, is the clue to savage distortions of sex, just as property motives

furnish the clue to patriarchal and capitalistic sex distortions.

 

In the savage use of magic we find the clue to the origin of many of our

evil practices, even though some of them are of later origin; for what we

call science and civilization are curious mixtures of modernism and archaic

thought and practice. Much of the past remains with us, and not all of it in

backward places, or among the " lower classes, " so that our modern world is

never purely modern but always a peculiar compromise with earlier thought and

practice. We live in a " mixed haze of primitive superstition and childish

faith, unscrupulous charlatanism " and exploitation and sincere efforts to

find the " materials " of a truly biological way of life.

 

It would be easy to trace out remnants of archaic culture in our laws,

religions, customs, art, etc., but our purpose Here is to confine our selves

to the " medical " field, For, medicine had its origin in the magic of the

shaman of prehistory. Its fundamental concepts of the nature of disease, of

cure, of " remedies, " etc., are hangovers from archaic ages. Much that it

likes to call modern is as old as recorded history,

 

When the medicine man or voodoo priest set out to find cures or remedies

for human ills, he ransacked the world for means to enable him to control the

forces of nature and super-nature as well.

 

Magic broths were made of herbs and, as time passed, the number of herbs

that went into them grew greater, as George A, Dorsey, Ph.D.,LL.D., says in

his Story of Civilization " on the ground that if one is brewing

wonder-working herbs to cure a wonder-worked disease, the more herbs the

better; and that if one got enough herbs one could cure anything, everything,

including senile decay. "

 

It was not enough to have herbs - they had to be poisonous herbs. They

must taste bad and produce " physiological " efects. The more dizziness,

nausea, vomiting, retching, gripping, diarrhea, and discomfort they produced

the greater power they were supposed to have in exorcising the evil spirits.

 

Man learned to use spices, not as a condiment menu, but as medicines,

Dorsey tells us that spices " came to be rated so highly that their control

was the chief factor in the long struggle for the Eastern trade - not in

spices, but in drugs worth more than gold. Cloves, opium, pepper, sandalwood,

rhubarb, and nutmegs were the prizes Genoa, Venice and Portugal fought for.

For a century Lisbon was the drug capital of the world; then the Dutch; and

after `torrents of blood-shed for the inoffensive clove', the English. "

 

These things were given by mouth, put on the skin to produce blisters, and

injected into the colon. For instance, after a convulsion, Charles II, was

given, among other treatments, an enema of antimony, sacred bitters, rock

salt, mallow leaves, violets, beet root, chamomile flowers, fennel seed,

linseed, cinnamon, cardamom seed, saffron, cochineal and aloes. Into that

enema went enough cures to cure him of whatever was wrong, If one did not

work, another surely would.

 

I know men today who give their patients enemas containing epsom salts,

salt, molasses, soap, and other ingredients. The old magic practices are far

from dead.

 

Before the physicians who killed the king were through with him, they

dosed him with almost the whole pharmacopoeia. Among the articles in the

subsequent drugging of the King were such spices as mint, nutmeg, and cloves.

 

The Creek and Hindu myths make it plain that man first learned to use

alcoholic drinks under the expert guidance of the ancient masked priests of

voodoo. The voodoos of South America taught him the use of quinine. There is

no doubt that coffee, tea, tobacco and other popular poisons came into use by

way of the magic hand of the shaman.

 

Spices are comparatively harmless substances. Compared to these the

medicine men have introduced the use of other poisons that are exceedingly

virulent - deadly, in fact.

 

The vaccine and serum practice is one of 'medicines' oldest voodoo tricks.

The use of vaccines and serums ante-dates recorded history, The practice is a

part of the magic of the ancient priest-craft. "

 

We are indebted to the voodoo boys (voodoo is a modern term and of focal

use) not merely for prostitution, the orgy and several other perversions of

sex, but for many of our bad habits - the coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol,

condiment and salt habits, for instance - and for our insane notions about

disease and cure.

 

There was no place in the practices of the magi for a conception of law

and order. Wind and stars, life and death, the seasons and crops - these and

all else were ruled' by a flock of capricious ghosts that had to be pleased,

cajoled or driven out by the conjurers tricks. The tricks we still have with

us and much of the " philosophy " that went with them, even if we do deny the

reality of the ghosts. We have not yet accepted the reign of law and the

existence of order in disease. Indeed " disease " is actually called disorder'.

 

In fact the whole concept of curing disease, the very belief that there

are diseases, comes to us from pre-historic voodooism. Any refinements these

concepts may have undergone during the ages, do not change their essential

characters.

 

When Dorsey tells of the coming of Hippocrates " into the welter of

priestly incantations, prayers, magic and drugs of the credulous world of

twenty-four hundred years ago, " he does not wholly overlook the fact that the

equally credulous world of today is still being duped and doped by these same

agents of the magi, even though he has not been able to emancipate himself

from a belief in the physician and surgeon and their bags of tricks. " Certain

it is, " says Dorsey, " that the torture the human body has been subjected to,

and the concoctions that have been put into the human stomach in the name of

Cure, are unbelievable. " Not unbelievable, Mr. Dorsey. for we see it daily

all over the world. Worse concoctions are in use now than our caveman

ancestors ever knew. What's more, they don't all vo into the stomach, Many of

them are injected directly into the blood and tissues. What he calls the

" unholy trinity of bleeding, purging and pucking, " is not dead and will not

die so long as we continue to perpetuate the errors, fallacies and lies of

voodooism - so long as our " educators, " of whom Dorsey is one, and our

educational institutions serve primarily to embalm and preserve the mistakes

of the past.

 

Dorsey cannot square these poisoning, blistering, carving, electrocuting.

serum squirting, pus punching practices with biology or physiology any more

than can physicians themselves.

 

" Lister, Pasteur, and Koch, " he says " were the mountain peaks " of medical

and biological science. How he managed to leave out that other charlatan,

impostor, and voodoo expert. Jenner is explainable only by his need for a

trinity.

 

Man's search for cures, restorers, prolongers, rejuvenators, circled the

globe and tried everything - " all the dregs and scum of earth and sea, " the

excreta of animals, animal parts, dried vermin, fire, steel, etc. The rule

then, as now, was: if the remedy does not kill the Patient it cures him. If

the patient gets well it proves that the " remedy " cures him. If some die;

they die in spite of the remedy. The medicine men of our American Indians

claimed when a patient died that he had been shot with a witchball against

which they possessed no shield. The " scientific " version is the germ is of

such virulence that we have no means of combating it.

 

In sketching what he conceives to lie the " progress, of medicine " Dorsey

makes the remark that " Avicenna was a pharmacologist; Paracelsus an

alchemist. " There wasn't then, and isn't yet, any discoverable difference

between these two related forms of voodooism.

 

Both of them, so far as they relate to " medicine, " are efforts to find

means of controlling the forces of nature by charms, concoctions, brews,

concentrates, extracts, lotions, potions. etc. If Paracelsus used powdered

fox lung or dried mice the present-day physician uses glandular products and

liver extracts.

 

How can these arts and " sciences " of the shaman continue to survive in the

light of the biological sciences? The answer is, they could not long survive

in our modern world except for the vested interest in the business of magic,

mysticism and superstition. Property (money, wealth - rent, interest, profits

and dividends) is the key to modern perversions of man and knowledge, as

magic is the key to the savage's perversions.

 

To the ancient prototypes of the modern voodoo priest we owe our belief

that " disease " is an entity that attacks the body; to them we also owe our

lingering wide-spread faith in the beneficience of poisons and violence; that

poisons, fire, destructive rays, and knives and saws cure the sick.

 

If Dorsey can speak of being " bitten by smallpox " it is because he is

still unemancipated front the false notions of voodooism. For this same

reason he believes that inoculation with pus from suppurating sores on the

abdomen of a previously " infected " cow will prevent smallpox.

 

Dorsey, says: " The modern biologic sciences offer a rational theory of

life, supply a rational theory of disease. These theories are founded on

facts, grounded in truths. "

 

I agree fully with Mr. Dorsey, but I challenge him or any other man to

prove that the medical profession has ever found out that there are such

things as " modern biologic sciences " ; that their theories of disease are

based on " facts grounded in truths, " or that their many and varied practices

have any normal relation to biology or have any sanction in the principles

and truths of biology. They are hang-overs from the distant past.

 

Dorsey reveals what he means by " rational theory of disease " when he

speaks of " what should have been expected once the nature of such formerly

deadly diseases as scarlet fever, diphtheria, diarrhea, etc., had been

discovered. " In his voodooism-infected mind the evil spirit has been

supplanted by the evil germ as the cause of " disease. " Serums and vaccines

now exorcise the had germs rather than the malignant imps against which they

were formerly used.