fact scanty. He rarely reasons from cause to effect, or from effect to
cause. Disease, in his belief, is the result of sorcery, the agency of
spirits or supernatural influences, undefined and indefinable. The
Indian doctor was a conjurer, and his remedies were to the last degree
preposterous, ridiculous, or revolting. The well-known Indian sweating-
bath is the most prominent of the few means of cure based on agencies
simply physical; and this, with all the other natural remedies, was
applied, not by the professed doctor, but by the sufferer himself,
or his friends.

[ The Indians had many simple applications for wounds, said to have been
very efficacious; but the purity of their blood, owing to the absence
from their diet of condiments and stimulants, as well as to their active
habits, aided the remedy. In general, they were remarkably exempt from
disease or deformity, though often seriously injured by alternations of
hunger and excess. The Hurons sometimes died from the effects of their
_festins a manger tout_. ]

The Indian doctor beat, shook, and pinched his patient, howled, whooped,
rattled a tortoise-shell at his ear to expel the evil spirit, bit him
till blood flowed, and then displayed in triumph a small piece of wood,
bone, or iron, which he had hidden in his mouth, and which he affirmed
was the source of the disease, now happily removed. [ 1 ] Sometimes he
prescribed a dance, feast, or game; and the whole village bestirred
themselves to fulfil the injunction to the letter. They gambled away
their all; they gorged themselves like vultures; they danced or played
ball naked among the snow-drifts from morning till night. At a medical
feast, some strange or unusual act was commonly enjoined as vital to the
patient's cure: as, for example, the departing guest, in place of the
customary monosyllable of thanks, was required to greet his host with an