WITCH DOCTORS’ ART

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27148, 18 September 1953, Page 3

WITCH DOCTORS’ ART

“Treatment Of Soul And Body” DR. DOUGLAS GUTHRIE’S ASSESSMENT The so-called witch doctor was a type of psychologist, although his methods contained a great deal of humbug, and were becoming practised less and less, said Dr. Douglas Guthrie, an Edinburgh specialist who has made a study of primitive medicine and its relation to psychiatry, in an interview last evening. Dr. Guthrie arrived in Christchurch yesterday in the course of a lecture tour of New Zealand. Witch doctors knew something about herbs, but he though; there was little to be learned from them, Dr. Guthrie said. Some people alleged that a closer study should be made of the herbs and drugs used by primitive peoples, and it had also been alleged they might have in their possession some secrets unknown to modern medicine, but he did not agree. So much had been thoroughly investigated already, and there was little more to be ascertained. “What we can learn from the witch doctor is the appreciation of the patient as a whole,” Dr. Guthrie said. “The witch doctor is never a specialist, but treats the whole man, soul as well as body. This idea might well be followed in modern medicine. Of course, the co-operation of the church with medicine, although valuable, is limited in application, and must be used with great circumspection, but there can be no doubt that herein lies a field which has not yet been fully explored by modern medical science.” It was witchcraft. Dr. Guthrie said, which had led Dr. Wyer of Switzerland in the seventeenth century to recognise that many of the so-called witches were in fact victims of mental disease, and that observation had been one of the earliest movements towards the modern study of psychiatry. Medicine today was in danger of becoming a technique rather than an art. Dr. Guthrie said. A study of the history of medicine was a means of leading the medical practitioner to realise that medicine must ever be an art as well as a science. Now was the time to recapture a more general outlook towards medicine, for specialists had reached a stage where they could not separate the wood from the trees. Dr. Guthrie, one of the first men seconded during the First World War from the Royal Army Medical Corps . to the Royal Air Force Medical Service, was commandant of the R.A.F.

officers’ hospitals in London. He did some of the first work on the effect on the ears of flying, work which has since been greatly developed. Dr. Guthrie has been in New Zea-

land for a month, and he will spend another month in New Zealand before touring Australia. He will return to Britain by way of the United States, in order to deliver the Clendenin® memorial lectures at the University 01 Kansas. Dr. Logan Clendening was a distinguished Kansas physician. The lectures deal always with some aspect of the history of medicine. As well as being lecturer in the history of medicine at Edinburgh University. Dr. Guthriei is a specialist in diseases of the ear, nose and throat. He has written several medical works.

and many papers on otolaryngology and on the history of medicine. He is a former president of the Edinburgh branch of the British Medical Association.

Dr. Guthrie is accompanied by his wife, and in Christchurch they are the guests of Dr. L. C. L. Averill and Mrs Averill.