Untitled - Smithsonian Institution

82 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 99
conclusion that only 25 per cent, or at the most 35 per cent, of the
botanical materia medica used b}^ this tribe is in accordance with the
rules and principles laid down by the United States Dispensatory
(14th ed.), 1877.
With the additional material collected by Mooney and by myself
it will be possible to publish a more complete survey in the near
future, the results of which already indicate that the tentative estimate
made, based on the material then available, is altogether too
optimistic.
Even the ''white people's" medical knowledge has made considerable
progress these last 50 years, and in the United States Dispensatory,
14th ed., 1877, properties are ascribed to many plants which
the 19th edition, 1907, has not cared to reprint. The elmiinatory
process of reducing the some 8,000 "ofRcinal" plants which western
European official therapeutics once knew has played such havoc with
these numbers that only about 300 plants are now officially recog-
nized as officmal.^^ Thus several of the Cherokee plants the use of
which was sanctioned by the school of half a century ago would now
be deemed indifferent.
It should also be stressed that if a sunple used by the Cherokee in
the treatment of a particular disease happens to be incorporated
in a Dispensatory, or listed in a Handbook of Pharmacy, this mere
fact in DO way confirms the efficacy of the Cherokee mode of usmg it.
The Cherokee rule of practically always using the bark of the trees
and the roots of the weeds and herbs does not always do justice to the
actual officinal parts of the simples used. Moreover, the mode of
administration of a medicine, which is of such capital importance,
is not deemed to be of any import whatsoever by the Cherokee
practitioners. Of many simples, the curative value of which are
higlily extolled by the Dispensatory, if only the product be taken
internall}^, the Cherokee medicine man will make an infusion or a
decoction, and blow it on the patient sitting 3 or 4 feet distant.
Finally, as has already been stated, no attention whatever is paid to
dosing the patient, nor to his idiosj^ncrasy.
The same evaluation applies to such practices as the prescriptions
relating to diet, seclusion of the patient, vomiting, etc. At first
these strike us as factors that may help considerably to cause or to
maintain conditions that help the patient in niany cases on the road
to recovery.
But liere again appearances deceive. As far as diet is concerned,
e. g., a particidar kind of food is never proscribed because it is thought
not to agree with the condition of the patient, but this taboo is simply
"von Marilaun, A. Kerner: "Das Leben der Pflanzen." Dutch translation
by Dr. Vitus Bruinsma, Zutphen, n. d., Pt. IV, p. 361.