Medicine, Magic and Religion: the FitzPatrick Lectures delivered before the Royal College of Physicians of London 1915 and 1916

Abstract

HAD Rivers lived for a few more years, there is little doubt that this book would never have seen the light in its present form. The Fitzpatrick Lectures, which he delivered in 1915 and 1916, are now published practically as they were delivered, but Rivers intended, as Prof. Elliot Smith has pointed out in the preface, to make them the basis of a comprehensive treatise on primitive medicine; and to this end he had already collected an enormous bibliography. The loss to science is therefore incalculable; for Rivers was, just before his death, projecting another advance in knowledge, which only he, of British ethnologists at least, if not in the whole world, was capable of making. Shortly before his death, he said that he was going to make it his business to set out in proper form the doctrine of the biological analogy, which has been so discredited through its misapplication, but, nevertheless, is of the utmost importance to the proper understanding of the social process as a whole. With his incomparable knowledge of medicine, psychology, and of ethnology, he would undoubtedly have produced work that would have added a pinnacle to his fame. But this was not to be, and the world will have to wait until another shall aris£ capable of the feat.

Medicine, Magic and Religion: the FitzPatrick Lectures delivered before the Royal College of Physicians of London 1915 and 1916.

By Dr. W. H. R. Rivers. (International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method). Pp. viii + 147. (London: Kegan Paul and Co., Ltd.; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., Inc., 1924). 10s. 6d. net.