HURON MEDICINE. xli 



•WAS the source of the disease, now happily removed. ^ 

 Sometimes he prescribed a dance, feast, or game ; and the 

 whole village bestirred themselves to fulfil the injunction 

 to the letter. They gambled away their all ; they gorged 

 themselves like vultures ; they danced or played ball 

 naked among the snow-drifts from morning till night. 

 At a medical feast, some strange or unusual act was com- 

 monly enjoined as vital to the patient's cure : as, for 

 example, the departing guest, in place of the customary 

 monosyllable of thanks, was required to greet his host 

 with an ugly grimace. Sometimes, by prescription, half 

 the village would throng into the house where the pa- 

 tient lay, led by old women disguised with the heads and 

 skins of bears, and beating with sticks on sheets of dry 

 bark. Here the assembly danced and whooped for hours 

 together, with a din to which a civilized patient would 

 promptly have succumbed. Sometimes the doctor wrought 

 himself into a prophetic fury, raving through the length 

 and breadth of the dwelling, snatching firebrands and 

 flinging them about him, to the terror of the squaws, 

 with whom, in their combustible tenements, fire was a 

 constant bugbear. 



Among the Hurons and kindred tribes, disease was 

 frequently ascribed to some hidden wish ungratified. 

 Hence the patient was overwhelmed with gifts, in the 

 hope, that, in their multiplicity, the desideratum might 

 be supplied. Kettles, skins, awls, pipes, wampum, fish- 

 hooks, weapons, objects of every conceivable variety, were 



1 The Hurons believed that the chief cause of disease and death was 

 a monstrous serpent, that hved under the earth. By touching a tuft of 

 hair, a feather, or a fragment of bone, with a portion of his flesh or fat, 

 the sorcerer imparted power to it of entering the body of his victim, and 

 graduahy kiUing him. It was an important part of the doctor's function 

 to extract tliese charms from the vitals of his patient. — Kagueneau, Rela- 

 tion des Hurons, 1648, 75. 



d* 



