BOURKE. } REMEDIES AND MODES OF TREATMENT. 473 
Kamchatka use enemata much in the same way as the Navajo and 
Apache do.’ They also use moxa made of a fungus.” 
It has never been my good fortune to notice an example of trephining 
among our savage tribes, although I have seen a good many wounded, 
some of them in the head. Trephining has been practiced by the 
aborigines of America, and the whole subject as noted among the 
primitive peoples of all parts of the globe has been treated in a mono- 
graph by Dr. Robert Fletcher, U. S. Army.® 
Dr. Fordyce Grinnell, who was for some years attached to the 
Wichita Agency as resident physician, has published the results of his 
observations in a monograph, entitled ‘The healing art as practiced 
by the Indians of the Plains,” in which he says: “Wet cupping is 
resorted to quite frequently. The surface is scarified by a sharp stone 
or knife, and a buffalo horn is used as the cupping glass. Cauterizing 
with red-hot irons is not infrequently employed.” A cautery of * burning 
pith” was used by the Araucanians.'* 
“Tt may be safely affirmed that a majority of the nation |Choctaw}| 
prefer to receive the attentions of a white physician when one can be 
obtained. * * * When the doctor is called to his patient he com- 
mences operations by excluding all white men and all who disbelieve in 
the efficacy of his incantations.”° ‘The | Apache] scouts seem to prefer 
their own medicine-men when seriously ill, and believe the weird sing- 
ing and praying around the couch 1s more effective than the medicine 
dealt out by our camp ‘sawbones.’”° The promptness with which the 
American Indian recovers from severe wounds has been commented 
upon by many authorities. From my personal observation I could, 
were it necessary, adduce many examples. The natives of Australia 
seem to be endowed with the same recuperative powers.? 
After all other means have failed the medicine-men of the Southwest 
devote themselves to making altars in the sand and clay near the couch 
of the dying, because, as Antonio Besias explained, this act was all the 
saine as extreme unction. They portray the figures of various animals, 
and then take a pinch of the dust or ashes from each one and rub upon 
the person of the sick man as well as upon themselves. Similar altars 
or tracings were made by the medicine-men of Guatemala when they 
were casting the horoscope of a child and seeking to determine what 
was to be its medicine in life. This matter of sand altars has been fully 
treated by Matthews in the report of the Bureau of Ethnology for 1883- 
*84, and there are several representations to be found in my Snake Dance 
of the Moquis. ‘‘ Writing on sand” is a mode of divination among the 
' Kraskenninikoff, History of Kamtchatka and the Kurilski Islands, Grieve’s translation, p. 219. 
2 Thid., p. 220. 
% Contributions to North American Ethnology, vol. 5. 
4Smith, Araucanians, p. 233. 
° Dr. Edwin G. Meek, Toner Collection, Library of Congress. 
© Lient. Pettit in Jour. U. S. Mil. Serv. Instit., 1886, pp. 336-337 
7 Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 1, p. 155. 
