Frontier Medicine: From the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941 - Hardcover

Dary, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307263452 ISBN 13: 9780307263452

Publisher: Knopf, 2008

Synopsis

In his new book, David Dary, one of our leading social historians, gives us a fascinating, informative account of American frontier medicine from our Indian past to the beginning of World War II, as the frontier moved steadily westward from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific Ocean.

He begins with the early arrivals to our shores and explains how their combined European-taught medical skills and the Indians’ well-developed knowledge of local herbal remedies and psychic healing formed the foundation of early American medicine.

We then follow white settlement west, learning how, in the 1720s, seventy-five years before Edward Jenner’s experiments with smallpox vaccine, a Boston doctor learned from an African slave how to vaccinate against the disease; how, in 1809, a backwoods Kentucky doctor performed the first successful abdominal surgery; how, around 1820, a Missouri doctor realized quinine could prevent as well as cure malaria and made a fortune from the resulting pills he invented.

Using diaries, journals, newspapers, letters, advertisements, medical records, and pharmacological writings, Dary gives us firsthand accounts of Indian cures; the ingenious self-healings of mountain men; home remedies settlers carried across the plains; an early “HMO” formed by Wyoming ranchers and cowboys to provide themselves with medical care; the indispensable role of country doctors and midwives; the fortunes made from patent medicines and quack cures; the contributions of army medicine; Chinese herbalists; the formation of the American Medical Association; the first black doctors; the first women doctors; and finally the early-twentieth-century shift to a formal scientific approach to medicine that by the postwar period had for the most part eliminated the trial-and-error practical methods that were at the center of frontier medicine.

A wonderful—often entertaining—overview of the complexity, energy, and inventiveness of the ways in which our forebears were doctored and how our medical system came into being.

About this title

About the Author

David Dary is the author of more than a dozen previous books including The Buffalo
Book, Cowboy Culture, Entrepreneurs of the Old West, Seeking Pleasure in the Old West, Red Blood and Black Ink, The Santa Fe Trail, The Oregon Trail, and True Tales of the Prairies and Plains. He is the recipient of two Wrangler Awards from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, two Western Writers of America Spur Awards, the WWA’s Wister Owen Award for lifetime achievement, the Westerners International Best Nonfiction Book Award, and the Oklahoma Center for the Book 2008 Arrell Gibson Award for lifetime achievement. He lives in Norman, Oklahoma.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INDIAN MEDICINE

Wisdom begins in wonder.
—Socrates

May is a delightful time to visit the Wichita Mountains in southwestern Oklahoma. The little bluestem, the big bluestem, switch, Indian, and grama grasses are green after their winter sleep, and the wildflowers display a variety of colors. Groves of post oak, blackjack, and eastern red cedar dot the landscape. Countless birds, including rare black-?capped vireos, search for nourishment. Everywhere there is a promise of nurture and it warms the soul, as do the warm and gentle breezes from the south. The Wichita Mountains are about 300 million years old, and among the oldest mountain ranges on earth. They consist of two rugged ranges of red granite reaching nearly 2,500 feet at the highest point. They run several miles east and west and enclose a natural prairie where buffalo, elk, prairie dogs, and other wildlife still roam in what is today the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. While the Wichitas may lack the majesty of the Rocky Mountains, they are impressive islands projecting upward from a sea of rolling prairie.

The Wichitas are rich in lore which includes legends of Indian battles and Spanish treasure. The Spanish penetrated the area in the 1600s, and French traders first traversed the region during the 1770s. Long before the first Europeans arrived, Indians found protection from their enemies in the Wichitas. They also found solace at what is called Medicine Bluff, located near the eastern edge of the mountains. The bluff rises three hundred feet above a creek whose waters were thought by Indians to have special qualities. Indians—Wichitas, Comanches, and Kiowas—most likely named the bluff in their native languages, designing it as a place of mystery with great spiritual powers. The first white men in the area named it Medicine Bluff after learning of this Indian belief. The word medicine probably derived from médecin, the French word for physician, which early French fur traders would have introduced into North America. The term was widely applied by whites. In time, Indians used the word to identify their own healing methods and spiritual mysteries.

Medicine Bluff is just one of countless natural places with distinctive features that Indians believed had special spiritual power because they could not rationally explain why they existed. Such natural places conveyed to them the essence of a religious experience but were not actually worshipped. Not all things with spiritual power, to be sure, were natural. Indians created smoking pipes, bundles, and other objects that became sacred and powerful once the makers performed special rituals to imbue them with qualities of sacredness or good medicine. For the American Indian, almost anything could attain such a therapeutic or mystical quality, emphasizing how great a role spiritual power plays in Indian medicine.

In “Letter Six” of his Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of North American Indians (1844), the artist George Catlin noted that “Indian country is full of doctors, and as they are all magicians, and skilled, or profess to be skilled in many mysteries, the word ‘medicine’ has become habitually applied to every thing mysterious or unaccountable and the English and Americans...have easily and familiarly adopted the same word, with a slight alteration, conveying the same meaning; and to be a little more explicit, they have denominated these personages ‘medicine-men,’ which means something more than merely a doctor or physician.”

Catlin related that every Plains Indian male has a medicine bag. When a boy is fourteen or fifteen, he leaves his father’s lodge, locates a secluded spot, cries out to the Great Spirit, and fasts. At night, he sleeps on the ground. He may stay there from two to five days, or until he dreams of an animal, bird, or reptile in his sleep. He believes the first such creature to appear to him in a dream is his protector for life, so designated by the Great Spirit. The young Indian then returns to the lodge of his father, tells of his dream, breaks his fast, and leaves again to find and kill the animal, bird, or reptile in question. After killing it, he skins it and uses the full skin to fashion his medicine bag, which he stuffs with grass, or moss, or something of the kind. He then closes it and will rarely open it again. He will carry the bag throughout his life, frequently paying homage to it and looking to it for safety and protection. Catlin saw medicine bags made from a variety of creatures, including otter, beaver, muskrat, weasel, raccoon, skunk, frog, toad, bat, mouse, mole, hawk, eagle, magpie, sparrow, and even a wolf. The size of the skin determines the size of the bag. When its owner dies, the medicine bag is placed with his remains.

Indians practiced their medicine long before Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. Believing he had reached the Indies, Columbus called the natives Indians, a name that stuck. Since most native cultures in North America were exclusively oral, the recorded history of Indian medicine begins with the arrival of the Europeans and their written observations. One exception was the Aztecs in what is now Mexico, who did have written records. After the Spanish arrived in 1519, however, most of these records were destroyed with great zeal. The Spanish did express their amazement at the Aztecs’ vast knowledge of medicinal plants, and noted that their practice of medicine was an intrinsic part of their spiritual life.

At the time, Europeans used the word medicine to describe any substance, regimen, or physical procedure that had a beneficial effect on the human body and restored health, and they viewed medicine as separate from religion. Among Indians, however, their medicine encompassed much more. “While they used herbal remedies to treat simple physical conditions such as burns, broken bones, sore eyes, and dislocations, the majority of Indian medicine was used to cure conditions which had no obvious physical cause,” writes one authority, Clara Sue Kidwell. “Symptoms included not only overt aches and pains, but could include what modern medicine might term neuroses, any behavior that was excessive or out of the ordinary.... Illness is a matter of balance and harmony with one’s physical surroundings, spiritual environment, and social group. Thus, it goes far beyond mere physical symptoms. If one’s balance is disturbed (witchcraft is a good example of how fear of an individual as a witch can have a disruptive effect in a group of people), illness results.”

Eric Stone, a Rhode Island physician, wrote in 1932 that Indian “mythology and theology are peculiarly rich and endowed with an unexpected symbolism and beauty, bespeaking an unusual ability to express their emotional and esthetic appreciation of their all-?important physical environment. Their métier was not pictorial, but lay, on the one hand, in decorative design and, on the other, in a wealth of folklore and poetry.”

Anthropologists, ethnologists, and historians tell us that early Indian medicine was closely tied to their reverence for nature and its supernatural powers. Indians lived most of their lives out of doors, and nature charmed them, but, as Clara Sue Kidwell points out, “Nature is threatening as often as it is benevolent. Ceremonies were held to restore balance that had been disrupted, or to assure that balance continued and nature produced the results that the people desired. The natural environment of the Great Plains was a source of spiritual power for individuals through vision quests, but vision questing required the endurance of pain and physical deprivation—sleep, food, water. Going alone into special places where spirits were thought to make their presence known was a way of acquiring access to that power. Going alone into the environment could also be a source of illness if one encountered a spiritual being without proper preparation.”

In most tribes, the principal person overseeing such matters was a medicine man or sometimes a medicine woman. After the arrival of the Spanish in the Southwest, this person was often called a curandero (or curandera), but ethnologists have sometimes used the Asian term shaman, defined by Merriam-Webster as a priest or priestess who uses magic for curing the sick. Kidwell, however, points out that a shaman or medicine man’s role is not just in healing, nor is it necessarily one of high prestige. The shaman or medicine man/woman supposedly had learned to control and use the spiritual power of nature. At the same time it followed for the people who believed in his or her powers that those powers might be used to do harm as well as to help. Moreover, Kidwell added that “being a shaman is also a dangerous position for the individual who must confront the power that is causing the illness and uses his or her power to exorcise it or bring it under control. If the curer’s power weakens, the illness may affect him or her.”

Whatever their title, such individuals received what others believed was a vision or a deep spiritual insight into their patients. They never lost sight of the spiritual side of health and disease, realizing the power of the mind. Most were viewed as wise, as knowing the secrets of healing, and as visionaries who mastered death. They were thought to be able to go into a trance, leave their bodies, and visit unearthly kingdoms. Some were also poets and singers who danced and created works of art. Their medicine simply denoted a spiritual power used for many purposes including healing with natural herbs and plants.

The role of the shaman varied from tribe to tribe. The Harvard anthropologist Roland B. Dixon wrote in 1908 that in numerous instances the position of shaman descended by inheritance in either the male or the female line, depending upon the prevailing tribal system of descent...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0307263452
• ISBN 13: 9780307263452
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400