送交者: 日尧 于 June 05, 2002 10:08:32:
A Johns Hopkins doctor was given a unique opportunity to spend a year with a relatively primitive tribe on an island in the South Pacific, and he jumped at the chance. Unfortunately only a few days after he arrived, the unfamiliar food gave him constipation, and then he realized he'd forgotten to bring anything to help. Fortunately the tribe's medicine man had a solution: he rolled up a piece of a palm frond into a tight tube, cut off an appropriate length, and told the doctor where to put it. The suppository worked, and within a few minutes the doctor's problem was resolved. Subsequent bouts of the same malady were corrected in the same manner.
At the end of the year the doctor was relating his experiences with the tribe's folk medicines to his Johns Hopkins' colleagues, and this was one of the first examples he mentioned. One of his colleagues suggested that the good doctor must have really missed civilized medicines, particularly for cases such as constipation. The doctor denied this assertion, held up several pieces of greenery, and remarked, "With fronds like these, who needs enemas?"