me evidence of the existence of a healing
art, which grew with its growth, and became part of the fabric of its
organization.

With primitive medicine, as such, I cannot deal, but I must refer to
the oldest existing evidence of a very extraordinary practice, that of
trephining. Neolithic skulls with disks of bone removed have been found
in nearly all parts of the world. Many careful studies have been made
of this procedure, particularly by the great anatomist and surgeon,
Paul Broca, and M. Lucas-Championniere has covered the subject in a
monograph.(2) Broca suggests that the trephining was done by scratching
or scraping, but, as Lucas-Championniere holds, it was also done by a
series of perforations made in a circle with flint instruments, and a
round piece of skull in this way removed; traces of these drill-holes
have been found. The operation was done for epilepsy, infantile
convulsions, headache, and various cerebral diseases believed to be
caused by confined demons, to whom the hole gave a ready method of
escape.

(2) Lucas-Championniere: Trepanation neolithique, Paris,
1912.

The practice is still extant. Lucas-Championniere saw a Kabyle thoubib
who told him that it was quite common among his tribe; he was the son of
a family of trephiners, and had undergone the operation four times,
his father twelve times; he had three brothers also experts; he did not
consider it a dangerous operation. He did it most frequently for pain in
the head, and occasionally for fracture.

The operation was sometimes performed upon animals. Shepherds trephined
sheep for the staggers. We may say that the modern decompression
operation, so much in vogue, is the oldest known surgical procedure.

EGYPTIAN MEDICINE

OUT of the ocean of oblivion, man emerges in history in a highly
civilized state on the banks of the Nile, some sixty centuries ago.
After millenniums of a gradual upward progress, which can be traced in
the records of the stone age, civilization springs forth Minerva-like,
complete, and highly developed, in the Nile Valley. In this sheltered,
fertile spot, neolithic man first raised himself above his kindred races
of the Mediterranean basin, and it is suggested that by the accidental
discovery of copper Egypt "forged the instruments that raised
civilization out of the slough of the Stone Age" (Elliot Smith). Of
special interest to us is the fact that one of the best-known names
of this earliest period is