[23] _Travels in West Africa._ (Macmillan, 1897, p. 453.)
Mainly from the point of view of the native apothecary, to which is added some account of the sleep disease and the malignant melancholy.
There is, as is in all things West African, a great deal of fetish ceremonial mixed up with West African medical methods. Underlying them throughout there is the fetish form of thought; but it is erroneous to believe that all West African native doctors are witch doctors, because they are not. One of my Efik friends, for example, would no more think of calling in a witch doctor for a simple case of rheumatism than you would think of calling in a curate or a barrister; he would just call in the equivalent to our general practitioner, the abiabok. If he grew worse instead of better, he would then call in his equivalent to our consulting physician, the witch doctor, the abiadiong. But if he started being ill with something exhibiting cerebral symptoms he would have in the witch doctor at once.
This arises from the ground principle of all West African physic. Everything works by spirit on spirit, therefore the spirit of the medicine works on the spirit of the disease. Certain diseases are combatable by certain spirits in certain herbs. Other diseases are caused by spirits not amenable to herb-dwelling spirits; they must be tackled by spirits of a more powerful grade. The witch doctor who belongs to the school of Nkissism will become more profound on this matter still, and will tell you all herbs, indeed everything that comes out of the Earth, have in them some of the power of the Earth, Nkissi nisi; but the general view is the less concrete one--that it is a matter of only certain herbs having power. This I have been told over and over again in various West Coast tongues by various West African physicians, and in it lies the key to their treatment of disease--a key without which many of their methods are incomprehensible, but which shows up most clearly in the methods of the witch doctor himself. In the practice of the general practitioner, or, more properly speaking, the apothecary, it is merely a theory, just as a village chemist here may prescribe blue pill without worrying himself about its therapeutic action from a scientific point of view.