522 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1941 



medical folklore which they had brought with them from northern 

 Europe is plain from the journal of Peter Kalm's Travels (1748-1751), 

 already referred to, and the Materia Medica Americana (Erlangae, 

 1787) of Johann David Schoepf, the Anspach-Bayreuth surgeon who 

 came over with Hessian troops during the Kevolution and traveled 

 westward during 1783 across Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh and the Ohio 

 River as far as Kentucky, returning via Annapolis and Baltimore. It 

 is not difficult to appreciate the belief in Indian remedies when such a 

 pious man as Heckewelder, missionary to the Delaware and Shawnee 

 in Ohio, testified that he had been cured of a stubborn rheumatism by 

 Indian sweating and that "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." ** In fact, so many Indian herbs had been reported by bot- 

 anists and their uses as practiced by so-called Indian herb doctors in- 

 cluded in herbals of the period (as witness John Bartram's "Descrip- 

 tions, virtues, and uses of sundry plants of these northern parts of 

 America^ and particularly of the newly discovered Indian cure for 

 Venereal Disease {Lobelia sp. L.)" (1751), and C. S. Rafinesque's 

 "Medical Flora" (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1828-30)), that Dr. Benjamin 

 Rush (1745-1813), the eminent physician of Philadelphia, decided to 

 investigate the desirability of admitting Indian remedies to the phar- 

 macopoeia. Having returned to Philadelphia in 1769 fresh from med- 

 ical training in Edinburgh, Rush not only attracted wide attention for 

 advocating a new "system" of medicine, but he soon joined the Ameri- 

 can Philosophical Society and began delivering papers on social issues. 

 Among his first was an oration, delivered February 4, 1774, on the 

 diseases of the American Indians," a tour de force of reasoning based 

 on a few facts taken from Lahontan and Charlevoix, some personal 

 observations of pulse rates taken on Indians visiting his city, and evi- 

 dence furnished by persons of experience with Indians, notably Dr. 

 Edward Hand, surgeon of the 18th regiment at Fort Pitt. Neverthe- 

 less, lacking personal observations. Rush maintained that Indian soci- 

 ety was adapted to a vigorous mode of life and, therefore, he discussed 

 the etiology of their diseases in terms of birth, diet, division of labor 

 by sexes, and common customs — a rather advanced viewpoint ethno- 

 logically. Their pediatrics — cold baths, cradleboard, and 2-year lacta- 

 tion — he found conducive to survival of the fittest, and their mixed 

 diet, periods of alternate rest and exercise, late marriage, and matura- 



** Heckewelder, Rev. John, History • • • of the Indian nations ♦ • ♦, p. 229, 

 Philadelphia, 1876. 



*» Rush, Benjamin, an inquiry into the natural history of medicine among the Indians 

 of North America, and a comparative view of their diseases and remedies with those of 

 civilized nations. Together with an Appendix, containing proofs and illustrations, 118 

 pp., Jos. Cruikshank, Philadelphia, 1774. 



