which
presupposes a skill in metallurgy and in the labors of the workshop and
the laboratory it has taken uncounted generations to accumulate. Before
the morphia which deadens the pain of neuralgia, or the quinine which
arrests the fit of an ague, can find their place in our pharmacies,
commerce must have perfected its machinery, and science must have refined
its processes, through periods only to be counted by the life of nations.
Before the means which nature and art have put in the hands of the
medical practitioner can be fairly brought into use, the prejudices of
the vulgar must be overcome, the intrusions of false philosophy must be
fenced out, and the partnership with the priesthood dissolved. All this
implies that freedom and activity of thought which belong only to the
most advanced conditions of society; and the progress towards this is by
gradations as significant of wide-spread changes, as are the varying
states of the barometer of far-extended conditions of the atmosphere.

Apart, then, from its special and technical interest, my subject has a
meaning which gives a certain importance, and even dignity, to details in
themselves trivial and almost unworthy of record. A medical entry in
Governor Winthrop's journal may seem at first sight a mere curiosity;
but, rightly interpreted, it is a key to his whole system of belief as to
the order of the universe and the relations between man and his Maker.
Nothing sheds such light on the superstitions of an age as the prevailing
interpretation and treatment of disease. When the touch of a profligate
monarch was a cure for one of the most inveterate of maladies, when the
common symptoms of hysteria were prayed over as marks of demoniacal
possession, we might well expect the spiritual realms of thought to be
peopled with still stranger delusions.

Let us go before the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, and look at the shores on
which they were soon to land. A wasting pestilence had so thinned the
savage tribes that it was sometimes piously interpreted as having
providentially prepared the way for the feeble band of exiles. Cotton
Mather, who, next to the witches, hated the "tawnies," "wild beasts,"
"blood-hounds," "rattlesnakes," "infidels," as in different places he
calls the unhappy Aborigines, describes the condition of things in his
lively way, thus: "The Indians in these Parts had newly, even about a
Year or Two before, been visited with such a prodigious Pestilence; as
car