82 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 99 



conclusion that only 25 per cent, or at the most 35 per cent, of the 

 botanical materia medica used b}^ this tribe is in accordance with the 

 rules and principles laid down by the United States Dispensatory 

 (14th ed.), 1877. 



With the additional material collected by Mooney and by myself 

 it will be possible to publish a more complete survey in the near 

 future, the results of which already indicate that the tentative esti- 

 mate made, based on the material then available, is altogether too 

 optimistic. 



Even the ''white people's" medical knowledge has made consider- 

 able progress these last 50 years, and in the United States Dispensa- 

 tory, 14th ed., 1877, properties are ascribed to many plants which 

 the 19th edition, 1907, has not cared to reprint. The elmiinatory 

 process of reducing the some 8,000 "ofRcinal" plants which western 

 European official therapeutics once knew has played such havoc with 

 these numbers that only about 300 plants are now officially recog- 

 nized as officmal.^^ Thus several of the Cherokee plants the use of 

 which was sanctioned by the school of half a century ago would now 

 be deemed indifferent. 



It should also be stressed that if a sunple used by the Cherokee in 

 the treatment of a particular disease happens to be incorporated 

 in a Dispensatory, or listed in a Handbook of Pharmacy, this mere 

 fact in DO way confirms the efficacy of the Cherokee mode of usmg it. 



The Cherokee rule of practically always using the bark of the trees 

 and the roots of the weeds and herbs does not always do justice to the 

 actual officinal parts of the simples used. Moreover, the mode of 

 administration of a medicine, which is of such capital importance, 

 is not deemed to be of any import whatsoever by the Cherokee 

 practitioners. Of many simples, the curative value of which are 

 higlily extolled by the Dispensatory, if only the product be taken 

 internall}^, the Cherokee medicine man will make an infusion or a 

 decoction, and blow it on the patient sitting 3 or 4 feet distant. 

 Finally, as has already been stated, no attention whatever is paid to 

 dosing the patient, nor to his idiosj^ncrasy. 



The same evaluation applies to such practices as the prescriptions 

 relating to diet, seclusion of the patient, vomiting, etc. At first 

 these strike us as factors that may help considerably to cause or to 

 maintain conditions that help the patient in niany cases on the road 

 to recovery. 



But liere again appearances deceive. As far as diet is concerned, 

 e. g., a particidar kind of food is never proscribed because it is thought 

 not to agree with the condition of the patient, but this taboo is simply 



"von Marilaun, A. Kerner: "Das Leben der Pflanzen." Dutch translation 

 by Dr. Vitus Bruinsma, Zutphen, n. d., Pt. IV, p. 361. 



