Book Description

Excerpt from A Study of Delaware Indian Medicine Practice and Folk Beliefs In connection with such studies I have in mind also the collections of unpublished herbal and charm cures Obtained from Various remnants Of Algonkian peoples on the Atlantic seaboard by Dr. Speck (powhatan Dr. Hallowell (st. Francis Abenaki and myself (1928; Gayhead and Mashpee Indian The material from these variousgroups although possessing its own ethnic individuality, still overlaps in certain respects. And Where the practices and beliefs of many tribes reveal similarity to the folk remedies of Europeans in the New World, the problem Of interpretation Of properties is made extremely compli cated. Realizing that many of the plants and weeds are migrants from Europe to the New World, we shall have to proceed with caution in View of the fact that the Indians had an ample native pharmacology Of their own before the period Of conquest, and that an experimental spirit was always and everywhere active in revealing new cures among the invading plant hosts. It will, therefore, not be an easy task to dis tinguish between what is Indian and what is European, until we can assign the concepts and practices to one or the other. N 0 one, I believe, would deny that there has been much borrowing, as it is called, on the part of the Colonial whites from the Indians as a glance at the voluminous contents Of the United States Dispensary (1926) will reveal. In the north this process was initiated by the French who accompanied Cartier (1906, pp. 73, 77) and who would have perished from scurvy, had it not been for the therapeutic knowl edge of those Algonquin or Montagnais who supplied them with an effective medicine concocted of white cedar bark. Subsequent to this reference in the early documents many others are encountered indicat ing a deep-rooted system Of primitive medicine which was, as it should be, partly pharmacological and partly psychological. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.