Web of Healing

Commentary on Primary Sources

For students and teachers, this section provides an example of a primary source document. It is also meant to serve as an example for how historians can make use of these sources. In general, this page offers a glimpse into the Web of Healing through local archival materials.

Image courtesy of American Philosoophical Society

Writings of Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Smith Barton of Philadelphia

Examination of primary source documents related to the medicinal and botanical knowledge of Native Americans in the 18th century leads immediately to one of the central difficulties of doing social history in general, and American Indian history specifically.  Namely, there are no documents written by 18th-century Native Americans on these topics.  Reconstructing life in the past from written records often favors the perspectives of the literate elite.  In this case, those writing about Indian medicine in early Philadelphia were primarily well-known members of scientific institutions like the American Philosophical Society, people like physician Benjamin Rush and the botanist Benjamin Smith Barton.  It should be noted, however, that some popular publications like Poor Richard’s Almanac, home remedy books, and apothecary advertisements also testify to both the knowledge and mystique of Native Americans with regard to health and healing.  For this essay, a brief look at the writings of Rush and Barton will begin to explore ways of “reading between the lines” of historical documents to help recover the “voices” of people that did not leave documents themselves.  These particular documents are also useful as an exercise in dealing with contradictory historical evidence.

Benjamin Rush’s Oration, delivered February 4, 1774, before the American Philosophical Society, held at Philadelphia: Containing, an enquiry into the natural history of medicine among the Indians in North-America and Benjamin Smith Barton’s 1798 Collections for an Essay Towards a Materia Medica of the United States are particularly useful primary documents for a number of reasons.  They are both discussed extensively in Virgil Vogel’s often-cited American Indian Medicine, and they represent different ends of the spectrum of 18th-century scientific thought about the efficacy and usefulness of Native-American knowledge. 

Rush’s Enquiry is a lengthy discourse on the lifestyle, environment, and health of Native Americans as compared to “civilized” nations.  It includes a section (pp. 27-37) on Indian remedies for disease, which Rush divides into “natural” (e.g. sweating, purging, etc.) and “artificial” (e.g. bleeding, astringents, etc.).  His conclusion to this inquiry, summed up on page 60, is that “We have no discoveries in the materia medica, to hope for from the Indians in North-America.  It would be a reproach to our schools of physic, if modern physicians were not more successful than the Indians, even in the treatment of their own diseases.”  Rush’s objective seemed to be to discredit Native-American healing, and to make the case for modern medicine built upon “Anatomy–Chemistry–Botany and Philosophy” (Rush, p. 35). 

Rush’s inclusion of Botany as a source of knowledge for physicians, while disregarding botanical knowledge from the Indians, would likely have seemed contradictory to Benjamin Smith Barton.  His 1798 publication Collections for an Essay Towards a Materia Medica... includes entry after entry ascribing knowledge of the medicinal value of various plants to the Indians (Barton).  Sometimes acknowledging his informants, and sometimes not, Barton’s “collection of facts” (p. 43) describes dozens of plants and their use as remedies to various diseases by Native Americans.  On pages p 40-41, for example, Barton describes the Carolina Pinkroot (Spigelia marilandica) about which he asserts “the whites learned the anthelmintic powers of this vegetable from the Indians.”  Barton attached the utmost importance to investigating indigenous medicines.  Indeed, on page 43 he dramatically states that “The man who discovers one valuable new medicine is a more important benefactor to his species than Alexander, Caesar, or an hundred other conquerors...All the splendid discoveries of Newton are not of so much real utility to the world as the discovery of the Peruvian bark...”  From the tone and content of these comments, it is likely that Barton did not hold Indian knowledge as worthless, and did not measure Indian cultures’ impact in terms of the quantity of cures they offered the medical community.

Taken at face value these two sources, from roughly the same time, written by men in the same scientific circles of Philadelphia, and addressing closely related topics, seem to contradict each other.  One lesson to be learned here involves the idiosyncratic nature of historical sources and actors.  People, or groups of people, in the past had their own biases and motives for seeking and accepting ideas and information.  There may have been personal, individual reasons for a medical botanist like Barton to find value in Native American knowledge while a famous physician like Rush did not.  Taken together, however, what Barton and Rush had in common was the need to address Indian medicine, whether or not they chose to accept it as true.  This, in turn, points to arguments made by Vogel and other historians of Native American cultures.  Namely, that American Indian bodies of knowledge were part of the cultural landscape at multiple levels of early American society, and medical knowledge of the time would not have looked the same without them.