Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/149

Rh must have often been a wonder that either the doctor or the patient survived.

There are those whose testimony has gone to favor the belief that the Indian doctors, as a class, had really a wonderful natural skill in the treatment of diseases, and especially in surgery; that they knew and made excellent use of the medicinal properties — emetic, drastic, and purgative, tonic and laxative, sudatory, emollient, antiseptic, anæsthetic, and antifebrile — of roots and herbs and barks, and that the course and results of their practice would compare favorably with those of our best scientific practitioners. Intelligent observers who have known the natives well, and have lived with them for years in their wild state, report to us most inconsistently and diversely on this subject. The weight of trustworthy testimony, however, reduces any claim in behalf of the natives for medical skill to a very slender substance, and the large majority of witnesses pronounce the claim absurd and wholly unfounded, while they describe the processes and material of Indian medical practice as monstrous, revolting, fraudulent, and utterly ineffectual, when not absolutely mischievous and fatal. In a volume published in 1823, under the title of “Manners and Customs of several Indian Tribes,” — purporting to be written by John D. Hunter, kidnapped from white parents when he was a child, and living among the Indians many years, till he was old enough to make his escape, — we have a most elaborate Materia Medica, giving us the common and the botanical names of a great variety of roots and herbs, as used by the Indians for specifics. The tribes to whom he ascribes a systematic practice of this sort, — which would do credit, in the main, to the profession among us, — were the Osages and the Kansas. He attributes to the Indian practitioners great skill, and to their simples much virtue. There were two marked peculiarities among them, which would be novelties to us: first,