Before the advent of scientific knowledge of the human body and modern medical practices, Native Americans and early American settlers practiced herbal medicine. Herbal remedies were used to treat a multitude of epidemic diseases, conditions, and ailments from prehistory until the end of the nineteenth century.
Prior to the arrival of settlers in America, Native Americans had developed practices to attend to their medical needs. Within Indian societies, shamans were responsible for the well-being of members of the community. Their reputations depended on their ability to diagnose illnesses and offer healing. Native American belief systems understood healing in holistic terms, encompassing the entire body, mind, and spirit. When someone fell sick, the healer would begin with a ritual consultation with the spirit world to ask for advice. Healers commonly spoke in languages not commonly understood by other members of the community, as spirits were thought to possess their bodies to enhance their perception and their healing power. These divining rituals were accompanied by music, chanting, and dancing. Patients were asked to face east during the healing ritual. These ceremonies often spanned multiple days and even weeks, until the patient was sufficiently healed. For broken bones and sprains, splints were made using wood and rawhide. Eye and lung infections were common, often from being exposed to smoke from open fires.
Traditional healers possessed knowledge of hundreds of medicinal plants, which were collected in a ritualistic manner to preserve their healing powers. For example, some specimens were collected from the sunny side of the tree. Botanicals were used in a variety of ways, as poultices or salves made from ground herbs mixed with animal fat to apply on the skin, or chewed into pulp and pressed onto puncture wounds created by arrow heads. Snakebites were treated by sucking out the poison and spreading chewed “snake root” plant onto and around the wound. For colds and other internal illnesses, dried herbs were made into teas or mixed with tobacco and smoked. Herbs were also poured on the hot rocks in the sweat lodge, where a patient would sweat and then be doused in the cold river for lung infections and other ailments.
Modern Medicine vs. Traditional Healing
Communities all over the world are integrating Western medicine with traditional folk medicine by working with traditional healers. In Laotian American communities, to cite one of many examples, medical professionals have begun working in congruence with traditional healers. The local healer can encourage the patient to follow through with taking prescribed medications or agree to a surgical procedure.
C. Fee
With the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans began dying from smallpox, influenza, measles, and other diseases to which they had no immunity. Eventually Indian communities became aware of the concept of contagion. They began cremating the dead as well as burning the deceased’s belongings and dwelling. These practices signaled an important adaptation in Native American biological understanding and medical practice.
The earliest English settlers brought to the New World an understanding of herbal medicine, but were unprepared for the hardships of life in a wilderness setting. In April 1607, the first settlers in Jamestown were already suffering from illnesses upon disembarking the ships and only one doctor was present to serve more than a hundred settlers. These first colonists initially suffered from malnutrition, living on a diet consisting of eating undercooked game, no fresh fruits or vegetables, and drinking suspect water from the nearby rivers. The combination of poor hygiene, misunderstanding of waterborne and foodborne illnesses, and lack of experience with local plants for food and medicines proved deadly.
The colonists and early settlers had an incongruous relationship with the local native communities as they tried to impose European rule over them. However, settlers who established a truce with them began learning their medicinal herbal knowledge and even received treatment from their traditional healers.
Due to the remoteness of the early American settlements, self-reliance on folk medicine became the deciding factor between life and death. Pioneer women began collecting, drying, and storing herbs for medicinal and culinary purposes. They began writing down remedies found in the periodicals and sharing them with their neighbors, homesteaders, and natives alike. Many remedies were discovered by trial and error. Treatment usually consisted of rest, fluids and medicinal herbs, application of heat or cold, and allowing the body to heal itself.
When the settlers were unable to alleviate the suffering of the sick person, they would call for a “regular” doctor. The best treatment of the time was considered bloodletting, blistering, and purging out the disease or sickness. According to the Hippocratic system, an imbalance of blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile—the “four humors”—was considered responsible for most illnesses. The medicines used by these early doctors included opium for pain and calomel, a toxic mercurial mixture used for purging.
Many patients became unconscious during this treatment and as a result, they would get much needed sleep and felt better upon awakening. Unknown to the doctors at that time, sleeping allowed the body to heal itself. As a matter of course, the doctors would take the credit for their purging treatment. Doctors did not know there were only nine pints of blood in the body. It wasn’t until 1799 when George Washington died that doctors began questioning these treatment methods. His initial diagnosis, “inflammatory quinsy,” led to a series of bloodlettings, and Washington never recovered from either his illness or the remedy.
The American population also had grown skeptical of current medical practices and began trying alternative medicines, including Native American healing, which succeeded in many cases after the orthodox medicine had failed. Historian Richard Dunlop’s book Doctors of the American Frontier describes an encounter between a Cheyenne medicine man and William Bent, who suffered from a throat infection or possibly diphtheria: “The medicine man string a sinew with sandburs and dipped it in hot buffalo tallow. This he forced down Bent’s throat with a peeled stick. When the tallow melted, he jerked the string out, pulling the infected membrane with it. Bent survived” (Steele 2005).
In the eighteenth century, epidemics of dysentery, diphtheria, smallpox, and tuberculosis killed many. At the time cities had no hygiene standards and waste and sewage befouled the streets. Additionally, most of the population lived near fresh water, where mosquitoes brought yellow fever and malaria to the masses. Milk was later found to be a carrier of typhoid, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and brucellosis. Going to the hospital often meant sure death, as doctors were going from the morgue to the delivery room without sterilizing their hands or equipment. Putrid fever ravaged through the hospitals as a result. The life expectancy at that time was an average of thirty-five years. In this era, most families coped with this adversity by utilizing the folk remedies rooted in the plant and animal life of their farms, meadows, and forests.
Powwowing
“Powwowing,” known as brauche or braucherei in Pennsylvania Dutch, is a form of folk healing that draws upon traditions involving incantations, amulets, and charms to channel the forces of good and to keep those of evil at bay. Practitioners believe that they call upon the healing power of God, while detractors claim that powwowing is charlatanism, or—worse—that it draws upon occult demonic forces.
C. Fee
As the nineteenth century progressed, new discoveries in science and medicine and new technological advances offered other paths to healing, and in many cases improved on the folk remedies that for centuries had predominated in European and European American societies. For example, microscopes, coupled with new frameworks for understanding the molecular composition of the human body, led to the discovery of bacteria, viruses, and parasites. This revolutionized both medicine and hygiene standards into the turn of the twentieth century, and offered a serious and ongoing challenge to traditional folk medicine.
René Fox Small
See also Traditional Medicine and Healing in Laotian American Culture; Witch Doctors
Further Reading
Kay, Margarita Artschwager. 1996. Healing with Plants in the American and Mexican West. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Laguerre, Michel S. 1987. Afro-Caribbean Folk Medicine. New York: Bergin & Garvey.
Steele, Volney. 2005. Bleed, Blister, and Purge: A History of Medicine on the American Frontier. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press.
Vogel, Virgil J. 1970. American Indian Medicine. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
William, Lyon S. 1996. Encyclopedia of Native American Healing. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Folk Medicine—Primary Document
Lydia M. Child, The American Frugal Housewife (1841)
Before the twentieth century, medical practice drew from folk traditions that reached back for centuries or more. Traditional medicine utilized a wide variety of botanicals to make teas, rubs, poultices, baths, and other remedies for common ailments. One proponent of folk remedies, Lydia M. Child, who was an abolitionist, Indian rights advocate, and suffragette, is also known for her poem “Over the River and Through the Wood” about a trip to grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving. Her handbook for women, excerpted here, gathered together common folk remedies and reprinted them to teach young wives proper care for their husbands and children.
SIMPLE REMEDIES.
Cotton wool, wet with sweet oil and paregoric, relieves the ear-ache very soon.
A good quantity of old cheese is the best thing to eat, when distressed by eating too much fruit, or oppressed with any kind of food. Physicians have given it in cases of extreme danger.
Honey and milk is very good for worms; so is strong salt water; likewise powdered sage and molasses taken freely.
For a sudden attack of quincy or croup, bathe the neck with bear’s grease, and pour it down the throat. A linen rag soaked in sweet oil, butter, or lard, and sprinkled with yellow Scotch snuff, is said to have performed wonderful cures in cases of croup: it should be placed where the distress is greatest. Goose-grease, or any kind of oily grease, is as good as bear’s oil.
Equal parts of camphor, spirits of wine, and hartshorn, well mixed, and rubbed upon the throat, is said to be good for the croup.
Cotton wool and oil are the best things for a burn. A poultice of wheat bran, or rye bran, and vinegar, very soon takes down the inflammation occasioned by a sprain. Brown paper, wet, is healing to a bruise. Dipped in molasses, it is said to take down inflammation.
In case of any scratch, or wound, from which the lockjaw is apprehended, bathe the injured part freely with lye or pearl-ash and water.
A rind of pork bound upon a wound occasioned by a needle, pin, or nail, prevents the lock-jaw. It should be always applied. Spirits of turpentine is good to prevent the lock-jaw. Strong soft-soap, mixed with pulverized chalk, about as thick as batter, put, in a thin cloth or bag, upon the wound, is said to be a preventive to this dangerous disorder. The chalk should be kept moist, till the wound begins to discharge itself; when the patient will find relief.
If you happen to cut yourself slightly while cooking, bind on some fine salt: molasses is likewise good.
Flour boiled thoroughly in milk, so as to make quite a thick porridge, is good in cases of dysentery. A tablespoonful of W.I. rum, a table-spoonful of sugar-baker’s molasses, and the same quantity of sweet oil, well simmered together, is likewise good for this disorder; the oil softens the harshness of the other ingredients.
Black or green tea, steeped in boiling milk, seasoned with nutmeg, and best of loaf sugar, is excellent for the dysentery. Cork burnt to charcoal, about as big as a hazel-nut, macerated, and put in a tea-spoonful of brandy, with a little loaf sugar and nutmeg, is very efficacious in cases of dysentery and cholera-morbus. If nutmeg be wanting, peppermint-water may be used. Flannel wet with brandy, powdered with Cayenne pepper, and laid upon the bowels, affords great relief in cases of extreme distress.
Dissolve as much table-salt in keen vinegar, as will ferment and work clear. When the foam is discharged, cork it up in a bottle, and put it away for use. A large spoonful of this, in a gill of boiling water, is very efficacious in cases of dysentery and colic.[1]
Whortleberries, commonly called huckleberries, dried, are a useful medicine for children. Made into tea, and sweetened with molasses, they are very beneficial, when the system is in a restricted state, and the digestive powers out of order.
Blackberries are extremely useful in cases of dysentery. To eat the berries is very healthy; tea made of the roots and leaves is beneficial; and a syrup made of the berries is still better. Blackberries have sometimes effected a cure when physicians despaired.
Loaf sugar and brandy relieves a sore throat; when very bad, it is good to inhale the steam of scalding hot vinegar through the tube of a tunnel. This should be tried carefully at first, lest the throat be scalded. For children, it should be allowed to cool a little.
A stocking bound on warm from the foot, at night, is good for the sore throat.
An ointment made from the common ground-worms, which boys dig to bait fishes, rubbed on with the hand, is said to be excellent, when the sinews are drawn up by any disease or accident.
A gentleman in Missouri advertises that he had an inveterate cancer upon his nose cured by a strong potash made of the lye of the ashes of red oak bark, boiled down to the consistence of molasses. The cancer was covered with this, and, about an hour after, covered with a plaster of tar. This must be removed in a few days, and, if any protuberances remain in the wound, apply more potash to them, and the plaster again, until they entirely disappear: after which heal the wound with any common soothing salve. I never knew this to be tried.
If a wound bleeds very fast, and there is no physician at hand, cover it with the scrapings of sole-leather, scraped like coarse lint. This stops blood very soon. Always have vinegar, camphor, hartshorn, or something of that kind, in readiness, as the sudden stoppage of blood almost always makes a person faint.
Balm-of-Gilead buds bottled up in N.E. rum, make the best cure in the world for fresh cuts and wounds. Every family should have a bottle of it. The buds should be gathered in a peculiar state; just when they are well swelled, ready to burst into leaves, and well covered with gum. They last but two or three days in this state.
Plantain and house-leek, boiled in cream, and strained before it is put away to cool, makes a very cooling, soothing ointment. Plantain leaves laid upon a wound are cooling and healing.
Half a spoonful of citric acid, (which may always be bought of the apothecaries,) stirred in half a tumbler of water, is excellent for the head-ache.
People in general think they must go abroad for vapor-baths; but a very simple one can be made at home. Place strong sticks across a tub of water, at the boiling point, and sit upon them, entirely enveloped in a blanket, feet and all. The steam from the water will be a vapor-bath. Some people put herbs into the water. Steam-baths are excellent for severe colds, and for some disorders in the bowels. They should not be taken without the advice of an experienced nurse, or physician. Great care should be taken not to renew the cold after; it would be doubly dangerous.
[1. Among the numerous medicines for this disease, perhaps none, after all, is better, particularly where the bowels are inflamed, than the old-fashioned one of English-mallows steeped in milk, and drank freely. Everybody knows, of course, that English-mallows and marsh-mallows are different herbs.]
Source: Child, Lydia M. The American Frugal Housewife. New York: Samuel S. and William Wood, 1841.