CHAPTER XXX.
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.
