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Review: Indian knowledge and medicine in 'Frontier'
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Filed Under: Arts & Entertainment

"Among the first things exchanged by European settlers and Native Americans were diseases and medical treatments. The Europeans gave the natives measles, yellow fever and smallpox; when the Indians tried to cure these contagions with traditional methods, such as bringing people together in sweat houses, they only spread the diseases more rapidly. But Native American remedies did seem to help with other maladies. In "Frontier Medicine," his entertaining and informative history of medical care on America's westward-moving frontier, David Dary recounts the story of German physician John Lederer, who was bitten on the finger by a venomous spider while exploring the Appalachian Mountains in 1670. His Indian guide treated Lederer by sucking out the poison and applying a plaster made from the root of the plant now called snakeroot. Lederer recovered and, a few days later, became the first recorded European to see the Shenandoah Valley.

Though some were inclined to view Indians as savages, settlers were not surprised to find native remedies effective; after all, Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries believed in a Law of Correspondences, which held that cures could be often found in the same locales where diseases occur. Among the native medicines adopted by many colonists, according to Dary, were a combination of animal grease and powdered hellebore root for wounds and the dried root bark of the wahoo tree as a mild purgative and heart stimulant.

Many of the earliest books to come out of the English colonies between 1670 and 1740 were natural histories documenting medicinal plants. The first American self-help manual may have been "Every Man His Own Doctor; Or, The Poor Planter's Physician," published in 1734 by John Tennent, who had arrived in Virginia's Spotsylvania County from England just 10 years earlier. It described many Native American herbal remedies, including chewing willow bark for headaches, applying witch hazel to sore muscles and eating raspberries to control diarrhea. But the most enduringly popular of these books was "Gunn's Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man's Friend," which remained continuously in print from 1830 to 1920 and is mentioned in both Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and John Steinbeck's "East of Eden.""

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