Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/175

spells than the prescription of suitable remedies." Among the Nootka Sound people,—

"Natural pains and maladies are invariably ascribed to the absence or other irregular conduct of the soul, or to the influence of evil spirits, and all treatment is directed to the recall of the former and to the appeasing of the latter."

So, too, of the Okanagans we read:

"But here, as elsewhere, the sickness becoming at all serious or mysterious, medical treatment proper is altogether abandoned, and the patient committed to the magic powers of the medicine-man."

Sequent upon such beliefs in the supernatural origin of diseases are various usages elsewhere. It is said of the Karens that "when a person is sick, these people [medicine-men], for a fee, will tell what spirit has produced the sickness, and the necessaryoffering to conciliate it." Among the Araucanians, the medicine-man having brought on a state of trance, real or pretended, during which he is supposed to have been in communication with spirits, declares on his recovery—

"the nature and seat of the malady, and proceeds to dose the patient, whom he also manipulates about the part afflicted until he succeeds in extracting the cause of the sickness, which he exhibits in triumph. This is generally a spider, a toad, or some other reptile which he has had carefully concealed about his person."

Speaking of the Tahitian doctors, who are almost invariably priests or sorcerers, Ellis says that in cases of sickness they received fees, parts of which were supposed to belong to the gods: the supposition being that the gods who had caused the diseases must be propitiated by presents. A more advanced people exhibit a kindred union of ideas. Says Gilmour—

"Mongols seldom separate medicine and prayers, and a clerical doctor has the advantage over a layman in that he can attend personally to both departments, administering drugs on the one hand, and performing religious ceremonies on the other."

Hence the medical function of the priest. When not caused by angry gods diseases are believed to be caused by indwelling demons, who have either to be driven out by making the body an intolerable residence, or have to be expelled by superior spirits who are invoked.

But there is often a simultaneous use of natural and supernatural means, apparently implying that the primitive medicine-man, in so far as he uses remedies acting physically or chemically, foreshadows the physician; yet the apparent relationship is illusive, for those which we distinguish as natural remedies are not so distinguished by him. In the first volume, in the chapter on