Untitled - Smithsonian Institution

90 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 99
me 5 per cent of what ho knew on this score; ultimately I extracted
all he knew—and a bulky lot it was—b}^ indirect and roundabout
questions.
Even a hasty perusal of the disease names (cf. the texts) and of the
curing methods (sec p. 60) will soon sliow that their anatomical knowledge
is very scanty. It lias boon said that people living in primitive
communities, especially those who have to rely on hunting for their
sustenance, manage to derive pretty sound and tolerably accurate
ideas about the structure and function of internal organs from analogy
of the anatomy of killed and dressed animals.
This, however, does not follow. The hunter who cuts up the gamo
in the forest, to bring home the better morsels, is not engrossed in
anatomical speculation, and his wife who disembowels the rabbit or
tlie groundhog is too anxious to have the meat barbecuing before the
lire to be able to aiford the time for scientific observation.
Even a people who practiced to such a considerable degree the
dissecting of corpses for embalming piu-poses as the Egyptians are
known to have long remained sadly ignorant of any anatomical
knowledge worthj^ of such a name; yet thej^ had the advantage of
laboratory work all the time.
A medicine man who coidd write, and whom I asked to draw ''the
inside of a man' ' in an oTitline which I had sketched, put a dot about
the throat, and said, "this is where our saliva is"^*; about the height
of the sternum, a small circle, with a lozenge on either side of it, which
he proclaimed to be the heart with the liver around it, and the kidneys
he put the navel approxhnately in the right position, and drew a line
above it which was to represent the diaphragm; having drawn another
circle mider the navel, which he pronounced to be the bowels, he laid
down the pencil with a sk/cwo" nt'co-.o"' ("this is all there is to it")
which so\mded as if he were highly satisfied with his feat.
Arteries, sinews, and tendons are all held to be one and the same
thing; in fact, there is only one word to refer to any of these:
tsyVaDi;-'no°. Nothing seems to be known about the function of the
blood.
A final remark I want to mal^e on this score is, that in spite of their
vast amount of erudition, and, in some cases, of their superior intelli-
gence, these old fellows do not seem to be any more methodical than
their lay congeners. Although a call is made on tliem three or four
times a week, they will persist in walking, or rather, climbing miles
and miles in the mountains each time, hunting for the herbs and roots
which they need for their prescriptions, instead of transplanting a
specimen near their own cabin, and laying out a garden of "officinal
plants" such as Charlemagne ordered the medieval monks to do.
" Sec p. 15.
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