Health | Opinion

Vince Two Eagles: Native medicine goes back thousands of years

Thursday, October 8, 2015

The following column by Vince Two Eagles appears in the Lakota Country Times. For more news and opinion, subscribe to the Lakota Country Times today. All content © Lakota Country Times.

Vince Two Eagles

The Rez of the Story
"Of History and Medicine"
By Vince Two Eagles

Hau Mitakuepi (Greetings My Relatives),

This time of year is when many Native people have gathered medicines throughout the millennia. Even today our people continue to utilize ancient medicinal plants, herbs and techniques to treat illness.

Here is one of those FYI’s brought to you by Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield co-authors of “American Indian Contributions to the World.”

Keoke and Porterfield write:

Medicine is the science of diagnosing, treating, and preventing diseases. It is also concerned with maintaining health. American Indians were sophisticated healers, relying on a number of botanical drugs that remain in use today, including guaiacum, ipecac, kaolin, and quinine. Guaiacum is used as a stimulant, diaphoretic, antiseptic, diuretic, antitussive and to treat inflamed mucous membranes of the throat. Ipecac is used to control poisons by causing vomiting. Kaolin is an upset stomach remedy. Quinine is used to treat malaria. Indians of both North and Mesoamerica routinely used antibiotic medications. The plains Tribes of North America used antiviral medications as well.
Aztec physicians were specialists in area such as obstetrics, the ears, and dentistry. Aztec eye specialists performed cataract surgery. Indigenous physicians of the Americas demonstrated extensive anatomical knowledge and understood how to set bones, treat wounds, prevent infections, as well as perform complicated surgeries such as arthrocentesis [surgery to remove fluid from the knee joint].
Father Bernardo Sahagun wrote of the duties of the Aztec physician in (General history of the things of New Spain): “The true doctor . . . is a wise man; he imparts life. A tried specialist, he has worked with herbs, stones, trees and roots. His remedies have been tested; he examines; he experiments, he alleviates sickness. . .” The medical practices he described were well established before European contact and stand in sharp contrast to the limited understanding of Europeans who until the late 1700s were generally ignorant of the cause of disease. They held that illness was divine punishment for sins, and because of this view, the sick often went untreated in Europe. Most advanced European physicians adhered to the teachings of Claudius Gale, an ancient Greek physician (ca. A.D. 130 - 200) who believed that illness was caused by an imbalance of bodily fluids, or humours, as these fluids were called. When doctors in Europe gave medical assistance, their treatments of choice most often were bleeding, vomiting, purging, and blistering. Although they used botanicals to treat illnesses, they often combined them with ingredients such as blood, dung, and urine. Beginning in the 1600s they added metals, such as lead and arsenic, to their medications, doing their patients more harm than good. Bloodletting, harsh emetics, and blistering (burning the skin until it blistered), were also standard treatments in Europe.
European colonists quickly learned on American Indian remedies. Many Indian botanical medicines were adopted into the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, a list of available drugs sanctioned by the medical community. By the beginning of the 1800s, non-Indian botanical or herb doctors began using herbal remedies learned from the American Indians to treat patients. As support of their practice, they pointed to the discovery of quinine as a treatment for malaria and digitalis, a heart medicine the Indians derived from foxglove. Non-Indian enthusiasm for Indian cures led to the creation of patent medicines. Nevertheless, Benjamin Rush [1745 to 1813; Physician and Founding Father of the U.S.], convinced that bloodletting worked, refused to believe that anything of benefit could be learned from American Indians. “We have no discoveries in the materia medica to hope for from the Indians in North America,” he wrote in 1774. “It would be reproach to our schools of physic, if modern physicians were not more successful than the Indians even in the treatment of their own diseases.” His opinion ran counter to reality.
Historian Fraser Symington, comparing non-Indian and Indian medical practices in the 1600s, wrote in The Canadian Indian: “The Iroquois excelled in their treatment of wounds, fractures and dislocations, and their herbalists provided a great fund of knowledge to Europe."