PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS.
By these names I mean to distinguish the good and honest practitioners
who are in the habit of curing and healing diseases and wounds, by
the simple application of natural remedies, without any mixture of
superstition in the manner of preparing or administering them. They are
very different from the doctors or jugglers, of whom I shall speak in
the next chapter. In one point, only, they seem to participate in their
ridiculous notions, that is, in the different manner, which I have
already noticed, of drawing water up or down the current of a stream,
as it is to be respectively employed as a vehicle for an emetic or a
cathartic. This singular idea prevails generally among the Indians of
all classes. They think that as the one remedy is to work upwards and
the other downwards, care should be taken in the preparation to follow
the course of nature, so that no confusion should take place in the
stomach or bowels of the patient.
With this only exception the Indian physicians are perhaps more free
from fanciful theories than those of any other nation upon earth.
Their science is entirely founded on observation, experience and the
well tried efficacy of remedies. There are physicians of both sexes,
who take considerable pains to acquire a correct knowledge of the
properties and medical virtues of plants, roots and barks, for the
benefit of their fellow-men. They are very careful to have at all
times a full assortment of their medicines on hand, which they gather
and collect at the proper seasons, sometimes fetching them from the
distance of several days’ journey from their homes, then they cure
or dry them properly, tie them up in small bundles, and preserve them
for use. It were to be wished that they were better skilled in the
quantity of the medicines which they administer. But they are too apt,
in general, to give excessive doses, on the mistaken principle that
“_much_ of a _good_ thing must necessarily do _much good_.”
Nevertheless, I must say, that their practice in general succeeds
pretty well. I have myself been benefited and cured by taking their
emetics and their medicines in fevers, and by being sweated after
their manner while labouring under a stubborn rheumatism. I have also
known many, both whites and Indians, who have with the same success
resorted to Indian physicians while labouring under diseases. The wives
of Missionaries, in every instance in which they had to apply to the
female physicians, for the cure of complaints peculiar to their sex,
experienced good results from their abilities. They are also well
skilled in curing wounds and bruises. I once for two days and two
nights, suffered the most excruciating pain from a felon or whitlow on
one of my fingers, which deprived me entirely of sleep. I had recourse
to an Indian woman, who in less than half an hour relieved me entirely
by the simple application of a poultice made of the root of the common
blue violet.
Indeed, it is in the cure of external wounds that they particularly
excel. Not only their professional men and women, but every warrior
is more or less acquainted with the healing properties of roots and
plants, which is, in a manner, indispensable to them, as they are
so often in danger of being wounded in their engagements with the
enemy. Hence this branch of knowledge is carried to a great degree of
perfection among them. I firmly believe that there is no wound, unless
it should be absolutely mortal, or beyond the skill of our own good
practitioners, which an Indian surgeon (I mean the best of them) will
not succeed in healing. I once knew a noted Shawano, who having, out of
friendship, conducted several white traders in safety to Pittsburgh,
while they were sought for by other Indians who wanted to revenge on
them the murders committed by white men of some of their people, was on
his return fired at by some white villains, who had waylaid him for
that purpose, and shot in the breast. This man, when I saw him, had
already travelled eighty miles, with a wound from which blood and a
kind of watery froth issued every time he breathed. Yet he told me he
was sure of being cured, if he could only reach _Waketemeki_, a place
fifty miles distant, where there were several eminent Indian surgeons.
To me and others who examined the wound, it appeared incurable;
nevertheless, he reached the place and was perfectly cured. I saw him
at Detroit ten years afterwards; he was in sound health and grown to
be a corpulent man. Nine years after this I dined with him at the same
place.