3/8 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



to kill her, when " she is placed on a seat behind the fire, and 

 one of her attendants complies with her request. He will appear 

 to drive a wedge through her head from one temple to the other. 

 The wedge is first shown to the people, and then secretly ex- 

 changed for another, which consists of two parts attached to a 

 wooden band that is slipped over her head and covered with hair. 

 Thus it seems that the butt is standing out on one side, the point 

 having passed through her skull. At the same time bladders 

 containing blood, which are attached to the band, are burst, and 

 the blood is seen to flow down her face 1 ' and so on. 



Many of these pretended supernatural performances were 

 associated with the " medical profession," as almost everywhere 

 amongst primitive peoples. But the American medicine-man 

 resembled the African witch-doctor far more than the Siberian 

 sharnan, because amongst the Americans sickness was as uni- 

 versally attributed to sorcery and other malign influences as 

 amongst the Bantu Negroes themselves. "The Indians had no 

 reasonable or efficacious system of medicine. They believed 

 that diseases were caused by unseen evil beings and by witch- 

 craft, and every cough, every toothache, every headache, every 

 chill, every fever, every boil, and every wound, in fact, all their 

 ailments, were attributed to such cause. Their so-called medical 

 practice was a horrible system of sorcery, and to such superstition 

 human life was sacrificed on an enormous scale. The sufferers 

 were given over to priest doctors to be tormented, bedeviled, and 

 destroyed ; and a universal and profound belief in witchcraft 

 made them suspicious, and led to the killing of all suspected and 

 obnoxious people, and engendered blood feuds on a gigantic 

 scale.... In fact, a natural death in a savage tent is a com- 

 paratively rare phenomenon ; but death by sorcery, medicine, and 

 blood feud arising from a belief in witchcraft is exceedingly 



common 2 .' 



In the treatment of ailments the medicine-men were left very 

 much to their own devices ; nor were the shamanistic functions 

 anywhere very clearly defined. On the whole the American 

 tungak, to generalise the word, may be regarded as a sort of 



1 Social Organization, etc. , p. 489. 



2 Powell, Indian Linguistic Families, p. 39. 



