ABSTRACT
The first "professional man" was the Shaman, the magician medicine-man, who to this day treats sickness in the primitive Siberian tribes and in other parts of the world. The Shamart characterises an animistic attitude to nature in which the world is ruled by forces for the most part hostile, and the illnesses from which men and beasts suffer—including death itself—especially death—are always due to somebody's malice. Doctors are not the only professionals who find themselves faced with unprofessional rivals, whether the direction of the activity is the administration of medicine, the building of a house or a bridge, the planning of a campaign or the cure of souls. A belief in magic may, as is well known, make an individual or a community impervious to the evidence of the senses, so that it is most unlikely that the professional attitude belonging to the "contractual period" could develop in a culture of the "status period".
