Medicine, magic, and religion : the Fitz Patrick Lectures delivered before the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1915 and 1916 / by W.H.R. Rivers ... with a preface by G. Elliot Smith, F.R.S.

  • William Halse Rivers Rivers
Date:
1924
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Medicine, magic, and religion : the Fitz Patrick Lectures delivered before the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1915 and 1916 / by W.H.R. Rivers ... with a preface by G. Elliot Smith, F.R.S. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    medicine and religion as the natural consequence of the intimate relation between disease and death. In this brief sketch of what I should have said if I had written a few years ago, there is much which I still believe to be true. That running through the history of mankind there has been in action a process of specialization of social function stands beyond all doubt, and I should have been keeping strictly within the truth in regarding the increasing distinction of medicine from magic and religion as an example of this process of specialization. There would also have been much truth in the supposition that disease and death are so closely connected that, even if the earth had been divided up into independent and self-contained departments, we should have expected much similarity in the reaction of different groups of mankind towards them. The fault I now find with the account I have just given is not so much that it is false, but that it is far from being the whole truth. It errs by giving a far too simple account of a process which has in reality been exceedingly complex. Transmission as a Factor in Human Culture The great change which ha^ taken place 1 in our ideas concerning the value of such a scheme of evolu¬ tion as I have sketched is due to several causes. I have time to-day only to mention one. This is that until recently far too little attention has been paid to the influences of degeneration in the history of human society. At one time the savage and barbarous cultures 1 [In his Presidential address to the Section of Anthropology at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (see Proceedings for 1911), Dr. Rivers has given an account of his change of attitude, which really initiated the new movement in ethnology, which the present book does so much to illuminate. Compare also chapter vi (“The Aims of Ethnology”) of his book Psychology and Politics (1923).]