510 ANT^UAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1941 



in back and neck as they grow older. The men carry everything fixed to a 

 carrying girth fixed across the chest. A deer weighing from a hundred to a 

 hundred and thirty pounds they will carry the entire way home without allowing 

 themselves to rest. 



They are subject to festering sores. Cured in one place they break out in 

 another. Chills and fever, dysentery, hemorrhage, and bloody flux in women 

 are very common among them. Venereal diseases having during the last years 

 spread more and more, * * * " 



The latter and possibly tuberculosis were the worst of the imported 

 infectious diseases which included measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, 

 chickenpox, smallpox, typhus, typhoid, malaria, and yellow fever.'* 

 Were it not for these introduced contagions, says the Jesuit ethnol- 

 ogist Frangois Lafitau, who visited the Caughnawaga Mohawk band 

 and the Abenaki of St. Francis during the second decade of the 

 eighteenth century, and scrofulous maladies caused by hardness of 

 drinking water melted from snow and a kind of phthisis (consump- 

 tion) contracted by exposing chest and abdomen to winter blasts, for 

 which they had developed no remedy, and which carried a majority 

 to the grave ere the prime of life, their otherwise rigorous consti- 

 tutions stood them to an extreme old age in which they had either 

 to be knocked on the head or suffered to go out like a light by a mere 

 default of nature.^' 



The early writers are unanimous in agreeing that Indians, includ- 

 ing the Iroquois, possessed some natural remedies capable of checking 

 endemic diseases, but assert that they excelled even European sur- 

 geons at healing wounds, setting fractures, and replacing dislocations. 

 The Iroquoian-speaking Wenro tribe were reported in the year 1639 

 when they migrated from western New York to Huronia on Georgian 

 Bay "* * * to excel in drawing an arrow from the body and 

 curing the wound; but the prescription * * *" was thought to 

 have no eflScacy unless a pregnant woman were present, whose condi- 

 tion in later times was generally considered bad luck in medicine.^ 

 Incidents from Indian wars furnish abundant evidence of this skill. 

 An Iroquois prisoner among Hurons has his thumb and forefinger 

 done up in "some leaves bound with bark;"^^ Father Poncet, cap- 

 tured, tortured, and finally delivered as a relative into an adopting 

 Mohawk family, had an amputated finger cauterized with an ember 

 and wrapped in a leaf of Indian corn. Subsequently it was poulticed 



" Zeisberger, David, A history of the Indians. Ohio Arch, and Hist. See. Pub!., vol. 19, 

 pp. 23-24, 1910. 



"Heagerty, J. J., Four centuries of medical history In Canada, 2 vols., vol. 1, p. 270, 

 Toronto, 1928. 



" Lafltau, J. P., Moeurs des sauvages Am6riqualns, 2 vols., vol. 2, pp. 359-361, Paris, 

 1724. 



»» Lalement in Le Jeune's Relation, 1639, Jesuit Relations, vol. 17, p. 213. 



*iLeMereier (1636), Relation of 1637, Jesuit Relations, vol. 13. p. 41. 



