CHAPTER IX - THE WITCH DOCTOR

Summary

African Medicine mainly from the point of view of the Witch Doctor.

We will now leave the village apothecary and his methods, and turn to the witch doctor, the consulting physician. He of course knows all about the therapeutic action of low-grade spirits, such as dwell in herbs and so on; but he knows more—namely the actions of higher spirits on the human soul, and the disorders of the human soul into the bargain.

The dogma that rules his practice is that in all cases of disease in which no blood is showing, the patient is suffering from something wrong in the soul. In order to lay this dogma fairly before you, I should here discourse on the nature of spirits unallied to the human soul—non-human spirits—and the nature of the human spirit itself; but as on the one hand, I cannot be hasty on such an important group of subjects, and, on the other, I cannot expect you to be anything else in such a matter, I forbear, arid merely beg to remark that the African does not believe in anything being soulless, he regards even matter itself as a form of soul, low, because not lively, a thing other spirit forms use as they please—practically as the cloth of the spirit that uses it. This conception is, as far as I know, constant in both Negro and Bantu.