342 



The Aborigines of Brazil. 



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too expensive a honorarium. I am not sure, however, whe- 

 ther the patient if asked to give them, would venture to re- 

 fuse. He might give them through fear, if not from grati- 

 tude : for the Paje is dreaded as the handler of mighty natural 

 powers, and it is dangerous to refuse him any thing. He also 

 takes care to make his rank and the rights of his position 

 respected. As a proof of his importance, I may mention that 

 among many tribes, the jus primce noctis is conceded to him. 

 To conclude : this point of view again presents to us that 

 deep degree of demoralization and of barbarism, which the life 

 of the red man presents, in all its phases and developments. 

 We must confess that the attempt to discover traces of a 

 higher kind of knowledge in the isolated and confused facts and 

 traditions which constitute Indian medicine, has been a failure. 

 Here, as in the history, the language, the mythology and 

 the ethnography of the red man, we find only one dark pic- 

 ture ; and while we cannot let so dark and sunken a state of 

 things pass by us in review, without feelings of grief and con- 

 cern, yet we immediately begin to wonder, and to ask this 

 question — what singular catastrophe has the red man ex- 

 perienced, in what fearful paths of error has he wandered for 

 thousands of years, to occupy now so degraded and so lament- 

 able a position ? 



This paper appeared originally in Buchner's Repertorium fur die Pharmacie, 

 in 1844, and was afterwards printed separately. We have been obliged to 

 abridge the third portion slightly. 



V. Martius's account of Brazilian medicine resembles in its general features the 

 history of that art among all barbarous nations ; we may add, that the same 

 strange mixture of credulity, self-deception, and imposture, ever varying in degree, 

 and preponderating at times on the part of the patient, at times on that of the doctor, 

 is the foundation among civilized as well as among savage men of the belief in the 

 efficacy of various absurd processes. Thus the alleged cures by homoeopathy, the 

 water cure, galvanic rings, mesmerism, or whatever happens to be the fashionable 

 delusion of the day, never fail to find a large circle of credulous believers, just 

 as the virtue of the Paje's mysterious processes is implicity believed in by his 

 patients; though this is, we fear, the true view of the case, it is mortifying enough 

 to our vanity. — Tr. 



