oKcHTs] THE SWIMMER MANUSCRIPT 41 



As soon as the medicine man, by this pseudo "psychoanalytical" 

 method has found out which dream has caused the ailment he is able 

 to prescribe the treatment and to go on his quest for herbs and roots. 



There are cases, however, where by this method no result is ob- 

 tained, and the medicine man's exertions remain unrewarded. One 

 individual dreams less frequently than another and the few dreams he 

 can recall may not contain sufficient elements to form a conclusion. 

 In these cases there is still the ever-useful and never-failing method of 

 "examining with the beads" to resort to; the procedure is virtually the 

 same as described (p. 132), only changing in this respect, that the 

 medicine man names a disease or a disease causer and asks of the bead 

 whether his statement is right. The brisk movements of the right- 

 hand bead gives an affirmative answer; its sluggish movements, or its 

 remaining motionless, a negative answer. 



A couple of unusual facts on the score of diagnosis have come to my 

 attention. When in the smnmer of 1926 W. was suffering from a 

 severe attack of toothache, that could not be cured by any of the 

 "usual" means, he was soon convinced that it could not be "just a 

 usual toothache" he was suffering from, but that it must have been 

 sent to him by a witch. One evening as he was sitting by the fire and 

 gazing into the fantastically leaping flames, he suddenly saw, grinning 

 at him from the glowing embers, the face of an old woman ; the face of 

 a woman he knew. She was Uving in another settlement, and had the 

 reputation of being a witch. So W. forthwith concluded that she 

 was the one who had "worked" against him and who had sent him 

 the toothache. According to the rules of the art, at which he was a 

 full-fledged adept, he did not lose time in laimching his counterattack 

 as a result of which the witch died before the sun had set seven times. 



As far as I could find out, W. is the only individual who ever had 

 experiences in this domain that emerged from the banal, the everyday, 

 and the common conceptions. I am quite confident that he was quite 

 sincere and honest about them, and I am anxious to point out that, 

 even if they are imknown to other members of the tribes, or of the 

 profession for that matter, still they absolutely conform in form and in 

 content to the pattern and the structure of the more common Cherokee 

 beUefs. 



The Cherokee do not pay much attention to prognosis. A patient 

 should officially show signs of improvement after four or seven days 

 of treatment. If the ailment refuses to be impressed by the Cherokee 

 belief in sacred numbers, and the seventh day brings no relief, an 

 expectant attitude may be taken by the patient, his medicine man 

 and his friends for two or three days, during which there are animated 

 discussions as to what might have been" wrong with the treatment or 

 with the diagnosis. Maybe the diagnosis was not absolutely wrong, 

 but was not sufficiently right; the patient may have been suffering 



