BEFORE the family doctors came, frontiersmen sawed off legs with
handsaws, tied up arteries with horsetail hair, cauterized them with
branding irons. Before homemade surgery with steel tools was practiced,
Mexican _curanderas_ (herb women) supplied _remedios_, and they still
know the medicinal properties of every weed and bush. Herb stores in
San Antonio, Brownsville, and El Paso do a thriving business. Behind the
_curanderas_ were the medicine men of the tribes. Not all their lore
was superstition, as any one who reads the delectable autobiography
of Gideon Lincecum, published by the Mississippi Historical Society
in 1904, will agree. Lincecum, learned in botany, a sharply-edged
individual who later moved to Texas, went out to live with a Choctaw
medicine man and wrote down all his lore about the virtues of native
plants. The treatise has never been printed.
The extraordinary life of Lincecum has, however, been interestingly
delineated in Samuel Wood Geiser's _Naturalists of the Frontier_,
Southern Methodist University Press, 1937, 1948, and in Pat Ireland
Nixon's _The Medical Story of Early Texas_, listed below. No historical
novelist could ask for a richer theme than Gideon Lincecum or Edmund
Montgomery, the subject of I. K. Stephens' biography listed below.
BUSH, I. J. _Gringo Doctor_, Caldwell, Idaho, 1939. OP. Dr. Bush
represented frontier medicine and surgery on both sides of the Rio
Grande. Living at El Paso, he was for a time with the Maderistas in the
revolution against Diaz.
COE, URLING C. _Frontier Doctor_, New York, 1939. OP. Not of the
Southwest but representing other frontier doctors. Lusty autobiography
full of characters and anecdotes.
DODSON, RUTH. "Don Pedrito Jaramillo: The Curandero of Los Olmos," in
_The Healer of Los Olmos and Other Mexican Lore_ (Publication of the
Texas Folklore Society XXIV), edited by Wilson M. Hudson, Southern
Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1951. Don Pedrito was no more of a
fraud than many an accredited psychiatrist, and he was the opposite of
offensive.
NIXON, PAT IRELAND. _A Century of Medicine in San Antonio_, published
by the author, San Antonio, 1936. Rich in information, diverting in
anecdote, and tonic in philosophy. Bibliography. _The Medical Story
of Early Texas, 1528-1835_ [San Antonio], 1946. Lightness of life with
scholarly thoroughness; many character sketches.
RED, MRS. GEORGE P. _The Medicine Man in Texas_, Houston, 1930.
Biographical. OP.
STEPHENS, I. K. _The Hermit Philosopher of Liendo_, Southern Methodist
University Press, Dallas, 1951. Well-conceived and well-written
biography of Edmund Montgomery--illegitimate son of a Scottish lord,
husband of the sculptress Elisabet Ney--who, after being educated in
Germany and becoming a member of the Royal College of Physicians of
London, came to Texas with his wife and sons and settled on Liendo
Plantation, near Hempstead, once known as Sixshooter Junction. Here, in
utter isolation from people of cultivated minds, he conducted scientific
experiments in his inadequate laboratory and thought out a philosophy
said to be half a century ahead of his time. He died in 1911. His life
was the drama of an elevated soul of complexities, far more tragic than
any life associated with the lurid "killings" around him.
WOODHULL, FROST. "Ranch Remedios," in _Man, Bird, and Beast_, Texas
Folklore Society Publication VIII, 1930. The richest and most readable
collection of pioneer remedies yet published.