Don't be this sickness soaring in my head!
Without a glance at this child - and as soon as you came -
In the medicine hut, I prepared the sweet herb
And blew you away with my breath."
Headache Song
Uitoto, from The Sacred Path
There is little doubt that early North American medicine has had a direct impact on contemporary medical science. Since its inception in 1820, the Pharmacopoeia of the United States of America has listed more than 200 domestic varieties of plants effectively used by various indigenous tribes. For more than three centuries, researchers of every culture have closely examined these plants, some of which have even demonstrated the building blocks of modern antibiotics.
When reports of successful curative Native American remedies first reached other continents, 17th-century Europeans were slow to accept them and dismissed them as unscientific "voodoo" employed by a lower culture. Europeans thought their own approach to disease and healing much more corporeal than that of the Indian. European physicians, limited by their own doctrine of signatures and Galen's system of humors, which still prevailed at the time, were slow to realize that they could ill afford such pharmaceutical snobbery. Virgil J. Vogel, author of American Indian Medicine, underscores the point: "While the Aztecs used such substances as decomposed corpses, excrement and menstrual blood, along with their useful simples, the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis of 1618 included mummy dust, human and pigeon excrement and stag's penis." Nor did the Enlightenment necessarily improve matters; Vogel further notes, "As late as the 18th century, Herman Boerhaave's Materia Medica included dragon's blood, oil of scorpions, troches [a form of pill or medicinal tablet] of vipers, crab's eyes and chalk."
When early European settlers first arrived on North America's eastern shores, they were ill prepared for many of the problems they would soon be facing, including disease. Since few physicians joined the initial passages to the New World, the settlers eventually came to rely on the medicine of aboriginal tribes. For a long time, Indian herbals provided the only medical relief for the white man, who often became indebted to the local chief for the tribe's services.
Many tribes took a spiritual view of disease and its treatment. Only their medicine man, or shaman, who had to prove being worthy of the sacred calling, could administer the empowered herbs to cure the sick. Often, especially in the case of internal disorders, the shaman prayed, danced, or chanted to the beating of drums as part of the ceremonial treatment. Disease was often attributed to demonic possession, or a deliberate disrespect of the forces of nature, including the inappropriate hunting of animals or making use of land, fire or water without first offering a prayer or gift of thanks. The Iroquois believed that disease sprang from unrealized dreams or desires.
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