Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/152

132 and in some surgical operations. Indeed many competent witnesses assure us that their skill surpassed that of trained practitioners, and instances are given of their successful treatment of desperate cases among the whites, as well as among their own people where the European surgeon had been baffled. This native skill was of high service, as the Indians suffered, in their mode of life, more from wounds, bruises, and fractures than from internal maladies. The purity of their blood and the simplicity of their food favored an easy recuperation from injuries, and they took great pains to exclude the air from festering flesh.

The signal triumph of native medical skill was in their conceiving and availing themselves of that seemingly paradoxical method of alternation between the extremes of heat and cold in the treatment of a patient which has been adopted by civilized Europeans and Americans, and credited to the Turks.

The “suderie,” the “sweat-box,” or the “vapor bath” are the names attached to a method of treatment which, with trifling modifications and adaptations required by different circumstances, was the principal sanitary reliance of the natives over this whole continent, with the possible exception of the Esquimaux. In an emergency, an Indian who had recourse to this method when suffering a malady might serve himself alone. Many who were prostrated and enfeebled by fever or cramped by rheumatism have been known to do this, by drawing on their own energies. It was desirable, however, that a patient should have one or more assistants in the treatment. A low hut, lodge, or cabin of bark or skins was constructed near to the water of lake or river. It was made very tight, with no orifice or air-hole save that through which the patient wholly naked crept into it, and which was then closed. Upon heaps of coal and heated stones water was suddenly poured, rapidly generating steam, which penetrated into every pore of the patient, nearly exhausting him into liquidation. In