The Jew and the Jew Stone

Natural History, June, 2000 by Stephen Jay Gould

Ruminations earlier views of fossils, medicines, and minorities

The human mind may love to contemplate exemplary universes of abstract grandeur and idealized perfection, but we can extract equal pleasure from a tiny embodiment of some great thought, or some defining event of a lifetime, in a humble but concrete object that we can hold in our hands and rotate before our eyes. We cherish such explicit reminders and call them keepsakes, souvenirs, or mementos--for their salience as markers of distinctive moments in our unique trajectory through the general adventure of human life.

For this reason, I have never been able to understand the outright purchase, from catalogs or store shelves, of distinctive items that (I would think) can only have meaning as mementos of our own experiences. I do, for example, cherish a few baseballs signed by personal heroes, but only because they intersected my life in a meaningful way--the pop foul off DiMaggio's bat that my father caught in 1950, as I sat next to him, and that the great man signed and returned after I mailed him the relic along with a gushing fan letter; the ball signed by Hank Aaron and presented to me after a talk I gave at Atlanta's Spelman College, as I, nearly speechless for once, stammered thanks to my hosts for the equivalent of an item inscribed by God himself. But what could a ball signed by a Ted Williams or a Pete Rose mean when ordered from a catalog by anyone willing to fork over a specified sum?

I take special delight in the particular category of things long known and admired in large abstraction but then seen for the first time in the form of a humble but concrete memento. I don't refer to first views of the grand things themselves--the obvious and anticipated thrill of initial contact with the Taj Mahal or the Parthenon--but rather to the sublime surprise of finding my father's card of honorable discharge from the navy after hearing his war stories for so many years, or seeing my grandfather's name entered on a ship's manifest for his arrival at Ellis Island in 1901.

As a scholar, most of my thrills in this category arise as unexpected encounters in actual print--in an old book read by real people--of the founding version of stories or concepts once learned in a classroom or textbook and stored as an important memory implanted by others but never validated by original sources. I get a special jolt when I first see (as my grandmother would have said) in shvartz--that is, "in black" ink or printed type--something that had long tickled my mind but had never stood right before my eyes in its overt and original form.

The tale of this essay begins with such an experience of transfer from vague abstraction to factual immediacy. I do not remember where I first heard the story--perhaps in a guest lecture by a distinguished visiting luminary or as a casual comment from a professor in an undergraduate class at Antioch College. I do not even know whether the tale represents a standard example, well known to all historians of early science, or an original insight from one teacher's personal research. But I do remember the story itself and the striking epitome thus provided for the revolutionary character (at its codification in the seventeenth century) of the explanatory system now called science.

The story featured a memorable example to demonstrate how respected styles of former explanation became risible and "mystical" in the light of new views about causality and the nature of the material world. The essence of the difference between prescientific and scientific explanations, my unremembered source stated, could be epitomized in a popular prescientific remedy for the healing of wounds inflicted by swords or other weapons. The prescribed salve must be applied to the wound itself, where, by modern understanding, the potion might well work as advertised, since early pharmacists and herbalists had, by experience, discovered many useful remedies, even if we now dismiss their theories about modes of action. But, the recipe for the remedy continued, the salve must also be applied to the weapon that inflicted the wound, for healing required a sympathetic treatment, a re-balancing, a putting right of both the injurer and the injuree.

The nub of the revolutionary difference between prescientific and scientific explanation, my anonymous source continued, lies beautifully exposed in this microcosm, for the Western world's transition to modernity may virtually be defined by the realization that although some material property of the salve may heal the wound by direct contact, the formerly sensible practice of treating the weapon in a similar way must now be scorned as utter nonsense and absurd mysticism.

This tale about treating the weapon as well as the wound has rattled around in my head for twenty years or more, with no documentation beyond a dimly remembered lecture. Then, a few months ago, I bought a copy of Johann Schroder's Pharmacopoeia medicochymica (the 1677 edition of a work first printed in Ulm in 1641), perhaps the most widely used handbook of remedies from the seventeenth century. And in this copy, published right in the midst of the ferment that generated modern science in the late seventeenth century, I found the formula for the salve that must be applied to weapons as well as wounds--in shvartz on page 303 and named Unguentum Sympatheticum Crollii, or Croll's Sympathetic Ointment (we shall learn more about Mr. Croll a bit later).