Oral magic, folklore and tradition / by B.R. Townend.

  • Townend, B. R.
Date:
1938
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Oral magic, folklore and tradition / by B.R. Townend. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    doctor associated diseased teeth with a systemic disturbance. Such an inference is hard to believe yet the text is straightforward enough and there is little doubt that these Assyrian physicians, though not entirely free from magical practices showed “ a sense of discrimina¬ tion and a sincere effort to attribute certain ills to physical causes and a worthy attempt to find out their physical cures.” (Royal Corres¬ pondence of the Assyrian Empire, Le Roy Thompson, Univ. of Michigan Studies, Part IV, pp. 35-36.) It is likely that Egyptian and Assyrian medicine fathered Greek medicine, but the soil of Greek thought with its ability to produce abstract conceptions produced something very different from the largely magical medicine of the older civilisations. Tooth extraction was one of the functions of the Greek physicians. We are told this by Hippocrates, Aristotle and Coelius Aurelianus. Cicero tells us that the third ^sculapius was the first discoverer of extracting teeth and purging bowels (De Natura Deorum III, 22) and Suetonius reports that Nero had a tooth extracted in Greece by a Greek physician in a.d. 67 (Suetonius, Vitas Duodecem Cassarum, Vesp. 5). One would hardly call these old Greek physicians “tooth drawers” in any deprecatory sense. They were skilled physicians with high ideals as evidenced by the Hippocratic code, but during the latter days of the Roman Empire it is likely that quackery and charlatanism were rife in all branches of medicine. We have evidence of this in the works of Galen, who complains bitterly that cobblers, carpenters, dyers and smiths, unsuccessful in their own trade took up doctoring, and goes on to say that these ignorant fellows “ know no more of ordinary culture than a donkey knows of playing on the lute.” Martial compares the physician with the grave-digger in a way decidedly uncomplimentary to the former ; — “ Diaulus held till recently The office of physician. But now in strict conformity A grave-digger’s commission.” Epigram i, 47. The toothdrawer of the baser sort was evidently well established in Europe by the tenth century, because we find Abulcasis (Az Zahraiwi) the famous Arabian physician and surgeon writing about that period, or possibly a little later : “You know that many a quack coming to extract the aching tooth, finds that he has extracted
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