Untitled - Smithsonian Institution

oKcHTs] THE SWIMMER MANUSCRIPT 41
As soon as the medicine man, by this pseudo "psychoanalytical"
method has found out which dream has caused the ailment he is able
to prescribe the treatment and to go on his quest for herbs and roots.
There are cases, however, where by this method no result is obtained,
and the medicine man's exertions remain unrewarded. One
individual dreams less frequently than another and the few dreams he
can recall may not contain sufficient elements to form a conclusion.
In these cases there is still the ever-useful and never-failing method of
"examining with the beads" to resort to; the procedure is virtually the
same as described (p. 132), only changing in this respect, that the
medicine man names a disease or a disease causer and asks of the bead
whether his statement is right. The brisk movements of the righthand
bead gives an affirmative answer; its sluggish movements, or its
remaining motionless, a negative answer.
A couple of unusual facts on the score of diagnosis have come to my
attention. When in the smnmer of 1926 W. was suffering from a
severe attack of toothache, that could not be cured by any of the
"usual" means, he was soon convinced that it could not be "just a
usual toothache" he was suffering from, but that it must have been
sent to him by a witch. One evening as he was sitting by the fire and
gazing into the fantastically leaping flames, he suddenly saw, grinning
at him from the glowing embers, the face of an old woman ; the face of
a woman he knew. She was Uving in another settlement, and had the
reputation of being a witch. So W. forthwith concluded that she
was the one who had "worked" against him and who had sent him
the toothache. According to the rules of the art, at which he was a
full-fledged adept, he did not lose time in laimching his counterattack
as a result of which the witch died before the sun had set seven times.
As far as I could find out, W. is the only individual who ever had
experiences in this domain that emerged from the banal, the everyday,
and the common conceptions. I am quite confident that he was quite
sincere and honest about them, and I am anxious to point out that,
even if they are imknown to other members of the tribes, or of the
profession for that matter, still they absolutely conform in form and in
content to the pattern and the structure of the more common Cherokee
beUefs.
The Cherokee do not pay much attention to prognosis. A patient
should officially show signs of improvement after four or seven days
of treatment. If the ailment refuses to be impressed by the Cherokee
belief in sacred numbers, and the seventh day brings no relief, an
expectant attitude may be taken by the patient, his medicine man
and his friends for two or three days, during which there are animated
discussions as to what might have been" wrong with the treatment or
with the diagnosis. Maybe the diagnosis was not absolutely wrong,
but was not sufficiently right; the patient may have been suffering