66 
toner's address. 
I am aware that thus to assign a greater antiquity 
to the office and functions of the physician than to the 
Respecting the medicine-men of the Indians of Virginia, Hariot, in 
his work, " A Briefe and True Report of the New-found-land of Vir- 
ginia,'* 1590, observed that they shave all of the hair from the head ex- 
cept the crown, and fasten above one of their ears the stuffed skin of 
a blackbird as the ensign of office. The physicians, according to this 
account, wore simply an apron made of the skin of some animal and 
a medicine-bag suspended from a girdle. 
According to John Lawson, speaking of the Indians of North Caro- 
lina, p. 347 ; *' As soon as the doctor comes into the cabin the sick per- 
son is placed upon a mat or skin upon his back and almost entirely 
uncovered. The conjurer or doctor appears then with the king of 
the nation, who attends him with a rattle made of the gourd, contain- 
ing loose peas or Indian corn, which he presents to the doctor, while 
some one brings a bowl of water." He further remarks (p. 37) 
that the chief doctor who came with the king of the Santee Nation to 
visit him was " clad in a match-coat made of turkey-feathers, resem- 
bling a garment of silk shag." They usually carried their medicines 
or drugs suspended from the neck in the form of a necklace, con- 
sisting of roots, barks, berries, nuts, etc. 
George Catlin, in his History of North American Indians, vol. ii, p. 
40, describes an Indian doctor, whom he saw making a professional 
visit, dressed in the skin of a yellow bear ; the head served as a mask, 
the huge claws dangling at his wrists and ankles. He shook furiously 
a rattle with one hand, and with the other brandished his medicine- 
spear or magic wand. The dress," says Catlin, "in all its parts is 
one of the greatest curiosities of the whole collection of Indian manu- 
factures which I have yet obtained in the Indian country. It is the 
strangest medley and mixture perhaps of the mysteries of the animal 
and vegetable kingdom that ever was seen. Besides the skin of the 
yellow bear, which, being almost an anomaly in that country, is out 
of the regular order of nature, and, of course, * great medicine ' and 
converted to medical use, there were attached to it the skins of many 
animals which are also anomalies or deformities, which render them 
in their estimation medicine mystery. To this outfit there were also 
attached the skins of snakes and frogs and bats, beaks and tails and 
toes of birds, hoofs of deer, goats, and antelopes, and in fact the * odds 
and ends' and fag ends and tails and tips of almost everything that 
swims or flies or runs in this part of the wide world." 
