INDIAN MEDICINES MADE FROM TREES 



BY HU MAXWELL 



COMMON tradition attributes to the Indian doctors 

 a wide acquaintance with medicinal plants and a 

 profound knowledge of the curative qualities of 

 herbs. That notion was held by some people who knew 

 the Indians in pioneer times, but usually such persons 

 were not competent judges of a physician's abilities, and 

 an opinion from that source was not worth much. There 

 is no question that some Indian doctors met with con- 

 siderable success in curing the sick when dealing with 

 simple diseases only ; but accounts of 

 Indian doctors curing cancer, tuber- 

 culosis, hydrophobia, and cholera, 

 should be accepted with caution. The 

 outstanding fact of greatest signifi- 

 cance was the redman's usual will- 

 ingness to risk a white physician in 

 preference to one of his own race, 

 when he had the privilege of choos- 

 ing between them. He had no su- 

 preme confidence in the savage doc- 

 tor with his combination of good 

 medicine and deceptive jugglery ; 

 for the two usually went together in 

 the redman's medical practice. For 

 that reason it is difficult for investi- 

 gators of the present time to arrive 

 at a just estimate of the real merit in 

 the Indian's medicines and methods 

 of applying them. This observation 

 is intended to apply more to the 

 tribes which occupied the eastern 

 part of the United States from one 

 hundred to three hundred years ago 

 than to those which still live in the 

 western part of the country. 



Within the past forty or fifty 

 years, studies of Indian medicines 

 have been made by competent scien- 

 tists who have sojourned among the 

 western tribes, gained their confidence, and learned what 

 medicines the half-savage doctors use and for what pur- 

 poses and with what effects they are employed. The 

 United States Bureau of Ethnology has compiled and 

 published valuable bulletins on Indian medicines of 

 modern times. In these bulletins the botany of plants 

 is correctly given arid the methods of preparing medi- 

 cines are set forth in detail. But information of so ac- 

 curate and satisfactory a character was very scarce in 

 early years in the eastern part of the United States. It 

 is greatly to be regretted that competent scientists did 

 not collect and preserve Indian medical knowledge in 

 early years when there was so much that might have 

 been learned. Intelligent writers on the frontiers were 

 few then, and a great deal of interesting and perhaps 

 valuable information concerning the Indian doctors and 



LEAF OF BEECH TREE 



Northern Indians made poultices of beech leaves 

 which adhered to the twigs all winter and were 

 easily procurable in time of deep snow. They 

 were a frostbite remedy. 



their medicines has been lost beyond recovery. The best 

 that can now be done in the way of preserving some of 

 the fragments of Indian medical practice in the forested 

 regions of eastern North America is to search through 

 the books of early travelers, traders, missionaries, hunt- 

 ers, and adventurers. A scrap is to be found here and 

 there which throws a little light on the subject; but such 

 mention nearly always seems to have been accidental. 

 There is no lack of books, and it is remarkable that so 

 much could be written and so little 

 be said on the subject of Indian 

 medicines. Many a frontier writer 

 dwelt at great length upon the prac- 

 tices of Indian conjurers who pre- 

 tended to cure the sick by beating 

 drums, shaking rattles, and dressing 

 in bear skins and buffalo horns, and 

 dancing before the patient ; but few 

 and short are the actual accounts of 

 the preparation and administering of 

 medicines, though that must have 

 been of common occurrence in the 

 Indian camp and village. It is 

 highly probable that the conjurer 

 and his tricks were called upon in 

 those cases only where the disease 

 was not understood, and that medi- 

 cines were administered in other 

 cases 



It is pretty certain that the Indian 

 doctors, deficient though they were 

 in scientific knowledge, did not re- 

 ceive justice from the pens of most 

 early writers. In most cases the red- 

 man's shortcomings as a doctor are 

 magnified and his virtues belittled, 

 or the subject is entirely ignored. 

 The most notable instance of this is 

 found in a series of books known as 

 the "Jesuit Relations," by French missionaries who, dur- 

 ing one hundred and fifty years, wrote voluminously of 

 life among the tribes from Nova Scotia to Hudson Bay 

 and New Orleans, and had scarcely a word of com- 

 mendation for Indian medical knowledge or practice. 

 Those missionaries were learned men, and they wrote 

 with the force and fire of fhe Apostle Paul ; but in vain 

 may their seventy-three volumes, which they wrote in 

 French, Italian, and Latin, be searched page by page 

 without so much as one page being found that describes 

 the medicines used by the Indian doctors. The mis- 

 sionaries wrote of things spiritual rather than of those 

 things which appertain to this life and things temporal. 

 This instance is cited merely to emphasize the fact that 

 what is known of Indian medicines has come down from 

 the past as detached fragments. 



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