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American Indian Medicine

IN APPROACHING THE SUBJECT of American Indian medicine, it is essential to establish the conceptual framework from which this medicine developed and was practiced. The development of methods of causal inference, such as the doctrine of signatures, trial and error, and serendipity, are aspects that may be kept in mind in sketching the salient features of American Indian medical practice. Available evidence suggests that two related aspects of this practice were simultaneously developing. Because functional mental illness was evidently more common than earlier believed, the American Indian practitioner limited his elaborate magical procedures to given cases. Secondarily there developed greater reliance upon herbalism and realistic accessories in treating organic disease. In American Indian therapeutics, the treatment was aimed to fit the apparent nature of the ailment. This causality was expressed in terms of American Indian beliefs in both the natural and supernatural and was applied in treating wounds, broken bones, or intrusion of a supernatural object (a concept almost universal among American Indians). Two other common disease concepts were sorcery and breach of social convention, which were often complicating factors. They excluded neither the trial and error method, use of the doctrine of signatures, nor serendipity in the further development of American Indian medical thought.