CHAPTER XIX.MEDICAL SYMBOLISM IN PRACTICE.
It is hardly necessary to say to the reader who has followed me this far that the scope of medical symbolism is not very restricted. In extent it is obviously not limited; nor is it without variety and the means of variety enough. Yet how little use does one see made of it! How seldom do publishers take any advantage whatever of it, on the covers of their books or anywhere else! And what little is here and there attempted is apt to be a trifle preposterous, on a par with the misuse of the serpent by the quack-medicine man, who confounds the most obvious religious (Christian) significance of it with the medical.
Examples without limit of questionable medical symbols might be given. Here is a publisher who makes use of the caduceus of Hermes; there is one who displays the club of Hercules, with a rather venomous-looking serpent crawling down it from aloft; and yonder one who exhibits a skull on a closed book, suggestive of a hopeless meditation on death,—the reverse of what the physician should indulge in. But, at a time when the absence of symbols is almost the rule, perhaps one should try to be a little blind to the faults of those which are met with.
Of a collection of medical symbols on hand, few are notably good. I may instance a fair specimen. On the title-page of a journal edited by the late Dr. Dunglison, a learned and sensible man,The American Medical Intelligencer, which had a brief existence in the latterhalf of the fourth decade of this century, appears the figure a copy of which is here given (Fig. 26). The idea is better than its execution.
Ideas for symbolic designs of medical import are not scarce. The instruments and drugs used by the disciples of Æsculapius afford a host, if one does not wish to turn to mythology or anything allied. But, although the scientific physician might properly hesitate about using, say, an emblem of St. Luke, the patron saint of physicians, there are mythological and related conceptions, many of which might be utilized to good purpose. Thus, if it be desired to give an Egyptian design on the cover of a book, say, on obstetrics, the main part of an admirable one may be found ready at hand on the wall of the great temple at Luxor.[530]It is the scene—and a sufficiently chaste one, too—of the maiden mother giving birth to the future king, Amunotoph III, for whom the temple or palace was erected about 1400B.C.She is seated on the midwife’s stool, as described in the Bible,[531]while two nurses have her by the hands, doing what they can to ease the pains of labor. Or, a representation of Pasht, Bubastis, or Sekhet, the sister of Horus and mother of Imhotep,—who generally appeared cat-headed because the cat, a most sacred animal, was consecrated to her,—would not be inappropriate; for, to use the words of Ebers, “she seems to have been honored as the deity who conferred the blessing of children and watched over their birth.”[532]
Fig. 26.—A Medical Symbol.
Fig. 26.—A Medical Symbol.
But, for a design of obstetrical import, there couldprobably be few better than one in which prominence were given to the good housewifery symbols,—the pestle, hatchet, and broom; those, respectively, of Pilumnus, a god of children; Intercidona, the goddess who first taught the art of cutting firewood; and Deverra, the goddess who invented the broom, that great instrument of cleanness and enemy of the Typhon, or, I may say, Hydra, of many modern doctors,—the disease-germ: the deities that saved the pregnant woman from harm from her special enemies, the unclean sylvan gods. The broom! Wise old Romans! Wiser than the unsteady enthusiasts of our time, with bottles of carbolic acid in their hands yesterday and of corrosive sublimate to-day. And with these symbols, especially if the design were for a work by a female author, there might be given a figure of Juno Lucina, the special friend of women in labor, the type of the Eileithyiai, the handmaids of Hera, of the Greeks.
And here I may observe that, according to ancient custom, the goddess Juno Lucina should be represented with one hand empty and, as it were, ready to receive the coming infant, and with the other holding a lighted torch, a symbol of life. The torch should be erect, for when the flame is turned downward it signifies death. In the seal of the American Gynæcological Society, a woman, possibly meant for Juno, is represented with a torch in her right hand and in the other a sprig of evergreen, with a baby resting on the arm. This is of obstetric import. The members of the society, however, consider themselves something else than midwives. Judging from their title, they might bepetits maîtres.