ROCKY MOUNTAIN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 95 
the Indians, and to this Hst Heckewelder adds rickets 
and scrofula; and Dr. Brickell says that dropsy, dia- 
betes, gout, stone, consumption, asthma, palsy, struma, 
and a host of European diseases, too numerous to 
mention, were completely unknown to the Indians of 
North Carolina. Hunter says that the diseases most 
common are rheumatism, asthma, fevers, pleurisy, and 
bowel-complaint. Smith, in his History of Virginia, 
records the fact that dropsy was sometimes prevalent 
among the Indians of that section. 
Jones, in his Antiquities of the Southern Indians, 
p. 33, states that the treatment of diseases by them 
did not depend so much upon the giving of medi- 
cines as it did upon strict attention to regimen and 
abstinence. Father Charlevoix bears testimony that 
the doctor never refused the patient anything that he 
desired to eat, under the belief that ''his desires in this 
state are the orders of the genius that presides over 
his preservation." Loskiel says that the sick w^ere 
given as diet a thick soup of pounded corn-meal. 
Carver says the physicians refuse their patients no sort 
of food they desire, and are never alarmed for their 
recovery unless all appetite be lost. Lawson in his 
History of North Carolina, already referred to, at p. 39, 
says: "I have seen such admirable cures performed 
by these savages, which would puzzle a great many 
graduate practitioners to trace their steps in healing, 
with the same expedition, ease, and success ; using no 
racking instruments in their surgery, nor nice rule of 
diet and physic, to verify the saying, qui medic e vivit, 
misere vivit. In wounds which penetrate deep and 
seem mortal, they order a spare diet with drinking 
