8 KEV. ALFRED T. BRYANT. 



would be called isiBindi. In a case of paraplegia you may 

 find the doctor vigorously carving rows of incisions about tlie 

 paralysed loAver limbs and rubbing therein fiercely irritating 

 powders, which might well be expected to stimulate any cripple 

 to almost superhuman activity ; but he is all the time quite 

 innocent of the fact that the evil is not there at all, but away 

 at the other end, in the brain. 



The method of the native doctor, then, in fighting disease 

 is to deliver a fierce frontal attack against each symptom 

 individually, which, as we may readily imagine, to one so 

 innocent of the nature, strength, and position of the enemy, 

 must often result disastrously. A patient down Avith severe 

 dysentery, that will tolerate no checking, he Avill proceed to 

 drench at once from above and below with a combination of 

 the most drastic astringents varied with a dose of the most 

 drastic purgatives. 



In spite of such blind empiricism it cannot be denied that the 

 native doctor does sometimes work a cure, sometimes quite a 

 startling cure, where the efforts of European physicians have 

 proved utterly unavailing. Remedies he has, as we shall see, 

 without number, and some of them truly helpful, suited to 

 every ill — physical, mental, moral and social — that man is heir 

 to. Frequently it is to these we may attribute his success ; 

 but not so in those phenomenal cases above referred to. 



In the opinion of the writer the secret of many Kafir cures, 

 and, it may be added, of many Kafir ailments, is not in the 

 action of matter on matter, of drug on flesh, V)ut in those occult 

 regions where mind works on mind and mind on flesh. 



It is not the quack's innocent mixture of tap-water and 

 burnt sugar that drives out the malady, but that powerful 

 battery of mental forces — confidence, imagination and will — 

 hitherto inert within the patient's own self, and which the 

 quack has so cunningly, and in the case of Kafir doctors, 

 perhaps quite unconsciously, excited to activity by his 

 convincing volubility and inspiriting methods. We often say 

 the native is favoured with remarkable recuperative powers. 

 Are these attributable solely to a more robust physical system. 



