Not only did the native American resort to a crude form of bloodletting but he practiced sweating as well—which was also common to seventeenth-century European medical practice. In Captain John Smith's description of Virginia it was noted that when troubled with "dropsies, swellings, aches, and such like diseases" the cure was to build a stove "in the form of a dovehouse with mats, so close that a fewe coales therein covered with a pot, will make the pacient sweate extreamely."
Before lighting his stove, the Indian covered his sweating place with bark so close that no air could enter. When he began to sweat profusely, the sick Indian dashed out from his heated shelter and into a nearby creek, sea, or river. An Englishman commented that after returning to his hut again he "either recover or give up the ghost."
The Indians, like Molière's stage physician, believed in the value of the purge. Every spring they deliberately made themselves sick with drinking the juices of a medicinal root. The dosage purged them so thoroughly that they did not recover until three or four days later. The Indians also ate green corn in the spring to work the same effect.
The Indian medicine man, like his European counterpart, frequently dispensed medicines or drugs. As has been the custom among many men in the medical profession, the medicine man would not reveal the secrets of his medicines. "Made very knowing in the hidden qualities of plants and other natural things," he considered it a part of the obligations of his priesthood to conceal the information from all but those who were to succeed him. On the other hand, the Indian priest showed his concern for the health of his people—and the similarity of his attitude to that of present day practices—by making an exception to his canon of secrecy in the case of drugs needed in emergencies arising on a hunting trip and during travel.
According to one early eighteenth-century history of Virginia, the Indian in choosing raw materials for drugs preferred roots and barks of trees to the leaves of plants or trees. If the drug were to be taken internally it was mixed with water; when juices were to be applied externally they were left natural unless water was necessary for moistening. Whatever the drug and however utilized, the Indian called it wisoccan or wighsacan, for this term was not a specific herb, as some of the earlier settlers thought, but a general term.
Besides sassafras, medicinal roots and barks, the Indian believed in beneficial effects of a kind of clay called wapeig. The clay, in the opinion of the Indians, cured sores and wounds; an English settler marvelled to find in use "a strange kind of earth, the vertue whereof I know not; but the Indians eate it for physicke, alleaging that it cureth the sicknesse and paine of the belly." Insomuch as the Indian priest preferred to keep his professional secrets, the colonist was unlikely ever to learn the "vertue" of the clay.
If the Indian medicine man had not believed that his gods would be displeased—or his prestige lowered—by revealing the nature of the wisoccan he prescribed, it would have been possible for the early Virginians to have drawn upon the Indian knowledge of, and experience with, the simples and therapies of the New World. (Perhaps the "vertues" of the clay would have cured the "paines" of the Jamestown bellies.) As it was, the settlers make little mention of a reliance upon the Indians for medical assistance.
CHAPTER TWO
Disease and The Critical Years At Jamestown