Something old, something new February 1985

Trevor Leggett was head of the Japanese Department of the BBC.

This is one of his broadcasts to Japan

Zubari for 17 February 1985

Hello listeners! In English we have a phrase: “It is old enough to be new.” It means, that when something is old it is often forgotten.  Then someone re-discovers it, he thinks that it is new, and so do most other people. None of them remembers it.  Finally, someone who does remember says: “Yes, this was known a hundred years ago. But it has been quite forgotten.  It is old enough to be new.” Today I want to give a few examples of it.

When I was a small boy, we every year had a holiday for a month in the country. The neighbours were farmers, and we knew some of the families. One day when we children were playing, the little son of one of the farmers fell and cut his knee.  His mother got a small ladder, and climbed to one of the big wooden cross-beams just under the ceiling.  She came down with some mouldy bread.  It was covered with greenish mould.  She washed her son’s wound, and applied a piece of this mouldy bread on to it.  Then she put some plaster over it.

I asked my own mother about this, and she said, “Oh, some of the country people have very old beliefs.  I think she believes this will prevent infection.”  My mother had completed a training as a nurse when she was young, and she did not believe in such ‘superstitions’.

But we know now that this mouldy bread would have been effective. It would have contained penicillin. This was about twenty years before penicillin was discovered.  But the country folk had discovered it. How?  From their own experience? But who would have been the first to put mouldy bread onto a wound?  Why would they have done it?  It is a riddle.

Another case was a State in India, before Independence. I knew the Prime Minister – a most brilliant man, with a modern education in law and also in medicine. When a vaccine had just been discovered by Western medicine, he wanted to introduce it as a compulsory measure, but the orthodox priests were absolutely against it.  They said it was a foreign intervention and would have bad results.

Then he had a splendid idea.  He told me: “We have many very ancient texts on traditional medicine.  I employed a few highly respected scholars to examine these texts, to try to find something similar to vaccination.  In the end, they did find some references, which showed that some sort of vaccination had apparently been practised by Indian doctors about 200BC.

“So, I arranged for a big public debate and the priests discussed them with my scholars.

In the end, they had to admit that their own revered ancestors in India had practised a form of vaccination.  So, this was not a foreign idea but a development of a very ancient Indian medical treatment.  All the opposition was immediately withdrawn.”

When I heard this story, I thought: “It was old enough to be new.”

Perhaps this kind of thing will not happen so much in Japan, because old things are preserved in small groups for a very long time, even after they have completely gone out of fashion. I think of the Kanpo system of medicine, for instance.

Usually one hears of these ‘superstitions’ only after they have been confirmed by modern research. But in truth, most of us would not like to be the experimental victims, before that.  Well, here is one.  There is an old English country superstition, that to put a spider’s web on a wound will prevent infection.  This has not been confirmed by science, but, of course, it probably has not been studied.

Well listeners, would you like to try it?

Till next time, Sayonara.

© Trevor Leggett