330 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1739. 



9. They are generally most famed for curing of woimds, and have indeed 

 various very good wound-herbs, as an herb commonly called Indian-weed, 

 which perhaps may be referred to the valerians, and be said to be platan i foliis. 

 They use also the gnafalium Americanum, commonly called there white plan- 

 tain. As to our plantain, or the heptapleuron, they call it the Englishman's- 

 foot, and have a tradition, that it will only grow where they have trodden, and 

 was never known before the English came into this country. The most famous 

 old physician among the Apomatic Indians, used mostly an herb, the leaf of 

 which is much like self-heal in winter. It makes a good salve, only it fills a 

 wound too fast with flesh. The great success they have in curing wounds and 

 sores, seems mostly to proceed from their manner of dressing them ; for they 

 first cleanse them, by sucking, which, though a very nasty, is doubtless the 

 most effectual and best way imaginable ; they then take the biting persicary, 

 and chew it in their mouths, and thence squirt the juice into the wound, which 

 they will do as if it were out of a syringe. They then apply their salve-herbs, 

 either bruised or beaten into a salve with grease, binding it on with bark and 

 silk-grass. 



10. The distempers among the English natives, are, scorbutical dropsies, 

 cachexies, lethargies, seasonings, which are an intermitting fever, or rather a 

 continued fever with quotidian paroxysms. These are now rarely sharp, but 

 show themselves in a lingering sickness. The griping of the guts mostly dry 

 and when the tormenta ventris cease, they generally shoot into the limbs, and 

 fix there, in a terrible sort of gout, taking away the use of the limbs. Thus 

 they will pine away to skin and bone, so that their joints will seem dislocated, 

 and their hands utterly crippled. Sore throats, which the last year were very 

 frequent, and deemed infectious, running generally through whole families, 

 and, unless early prevented, became a cancerous humour, and had effects like 

 the French-pox. Likewise pains in the limbs, which seemed to proceed partly 

 from the same humour floating up and down the body. These pains are very 

 severe, mostly nocturnal ; for while they walk, if they have the use of their 

 limbs, they feel the least pain. The oil of a fish called a drum, was found very 

 effectual to cure these pains, and restore the limbs. 



There are three sorts of oils in that country, the virtues of which might not 

 perhaps be found despicable ; the oil of drums, the oil of rattle-snakes, and the 

 oil of Turkey bustards. The oil of sassafras-leaves may be deservedly considered 

 too, for they will almost entirely dissolve into an oil. But to return. There is 

 another sort of distemper, which seems to be the lepra Graecorum. And it 

 may perhaps be no bad conjecture, that this chiefly proceeds from their feeding 

 so much on a delicate luscious sort of pork. Among the Indians they have a 



