ABSTRACT
Historical research has established that accounts of what are regarded as legends of antiquity, such as the Flood and the continent of Atlantis, most probably have a foundation in the occurrences of prehistory. The stories common to all the ancient races, of monstrous animals, for example, may in some cases merely represent the memory, changed by later events, of prehistoric realities. Magic medicine has been maintained practically unchanged almost up to our own day among people removed from their contact with civilization, as for instance in the Polynesian islands and in certain regions of central Africa and Australia. Particularly interesting, because better known and better documented, is the medicine of pre-Columbian America – Mayans, Aztecs, Incas, Araucanians. The medicine of the most ancient periods, then, was at first essentially empirical; on this basis was magic medicine then developed. Thus popular medicine stands in close relation to the observation of nature on one side and to magical beliefs on the other.
