When one remembers that many of the watercourses here named would be considered large rivers outside of South America; that, notwithstanding their countless rapids and waterfalls, necessitating numberless portages, Mme. Coudreau explored all these rivers from their embouchures to as near their sources as the water would carry her rude dugouts, we can form some idea of the miles she traveled and of the stupendous labor that was involved in making these long journeys in the sweltering and debilitating and insect-laden atmosphere of the Amazon basin. CHAPTER VIII WOMEN IN MEDICINE AND SURGERY As woman was the first nurse, so was she also the first practitioner of the healing art. Among savages the world over it is the women, in the great majority of cases, who have the care of the sick and wounded, and who, by reason of their superior knowledge of simples for the cure of diseases, occupy the position of doctors. In certain parts of the uncivilized world there are, it is true, shamans or medicine men; but these are conjurers or exorcists, who profess to expel disease, or rather the evil spirits causing the disease, by sorcery or incantation, rather than physicians who essay to cure ailments or relieve suffering by the use of substances which experience has showed to possess remedial properties. In a word, the shaman is a kind of a religious functionary who imposes on the ignorance of his tribe and who holds his position by the fear he excites, and not by any knowledge he possesses of the healing art. It was the same, we may believe, in the early history of our race--women, and not men, were the first physicians; and they were also most probably the first surgeons. According to Greek mythology, the god of the medical art was Aesculapius, a male; but his six daughters, as antiquity beautifully expressed it, were not only goddesses but were also medical mistresses--_artifices medici_--of suffering humanity. Of these Hygiea was specially distinguished as the goddess of health, or, rather, as the conserver of good health, while Panacea was invoked as the restorer of health after it had been impaired or lost. One of the most beautiful pictures in the Iliad is that representing the daughter of Augea, King of the Epei, caring for the wounded and suffering Greeks on the plain before Troy. She was: "His eldest born, hight Agamede, with golden hair, A leech was she, and well she knew all herbs on ground that grew." Nothing deterred by the din of battle around her, she provided cordial potions for the disabled warrior and prepared "The gentle bath and washed their gory wounds." What a beautiful prototype of another ministering angel in the same land nearly thirty centuries later, amid similar scenes of suffering--of one who, though unsung by immortal bard, the world will never let die--the courageous, the self-sacrificing Florence Nightingale.