Page:The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina.djvu/56

51 nature either of contagion or infection, and are consequently not aware that disease can be propagated readily by those means.

Phlebotomy is practised to a very considerable extent for many of their ailments. It is performed upon the cupping principle merely, their surgical knowledge being too limited to allow of their understanding the efficacy of opening one of the larger veins when blood-letting is desirable. Their cupping operation is effected in the following manner:—They scarify the part from which they wish to draw the blood by means of a sharpened mussel-shell, and when this has been sufficiently done the operator sucks the wound with his mouth, spitting out the blood from time to time, until he imagines sufficient has been extracted. Much relief is afforded by this practice to those suffering from headache, inflammation of the bowels, and opthalmic [sic] sore eyes, all of which ills prevail amongst the natives to an unenviable extent.

For pulmonary affections and rheumatic fever (both of which diseases are very common and very fatal with the aborigines) they make use of the vapour bath, from which much relief is obtained. The bath is constructed in a very similar manner to their cooking ovens, the only real difference being simply that the hole for the bath is made sufficiently large to contain the body of the patient, and the glowing bottom of the hole is covered to the depth of a foot and a half with green boughs which had previously been made damp, instead of a thin sprinkling of moist grass, as is the case when cooking. When the hole has been sufficiently heated the ashes, etc., are scraped out, and the damp green