Critique of Secondary Source
This essay examines a secondary historical interpretation of evidence in detail. For students and teachers, this section is meant to illustrate the critical perspective required when drawing on secondary sources.
Virgil J. Vogel, American Indian Medicine
Critique of: Virgil J. Vogel, American Indian Medicine (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970).
As mentioned in the historiographical essay, Virgil Vogel’s American Indian Medicine, published in 1970, is considered the “classic” work of Native American history that specifically deals with indigenous medical knowledge and its relation to European American health practices. Additionally, as noted, Vogel’s work is viewed more skeptically by some historians of medicine and botany who couch the impact of Indian medicine in terms of its incorporation into elite, professional spheres of early American health care and science. American Indian Medicine is an important and often cited secondary source on this topic. This essay will explore the book in greater detail, briefly describing Vogel’s main arguments and commenting on a few of his sources related to 18th-century Philadelphia.
Vogel draws upon a variety of sources to explore two major themes: 1. Past American Indian ideas about health, and the practices and methods they used to treat illness; and 2. The historical contributions of these Native American healing practices to both “folk” medicine and pharmacology. Vogel cites various additions of the Pharmacopeia of the Unites States of America from 1820 through 1960 to point out that over 170 drugs on this list were used by North American Indians, and draws upon primary source documents to demonstrate early reports of the effective use of these drugs by Native Americans. He also shows that the influence of Indian knowledge extended beyond the pharmacopeia of professional medicine, noting on page 263 that “many more [plants] were borrowed from the natives and handed down through generations so that American folk medicine became a blend of the herbal lore of two continents, or even three, for the Negro, too, had some influence on domestic remedies.” Furthermore, Vogel argues that domestic medicine, relying in part on Native-American knowledge, could serve as an intermediate step between Indian practices and “official acceptance.” Finally, he cites the appropriation of the term “Indian doctor” by “lay healers” and "quacks" as testament to the “esteem in which Indian curing skill was held” (p. 264) in the larger culture.
With regard to 18th-century Philadelphia, the “Early Observations of White Men on Indian Medicine” chapter of American Indian Medicine includes a section on the middle colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland (pp. 58-71), and specifically discusses “The Medical Botanists of Philadelphia.” Vogel briefly highlights the accounts of 17th-century explorers to the region and 18th-century missionaries, but devotes the majority of this section to early republic scientific elites like Dr. Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Smith Barton (for a closer look at the writings of these well-known Philadelphians, click here). Vogel rightly points out the ambivalent nature of these historical accounts with regard to Native-American health and healing practices. The European-American accounts that he uses are at times credulous, and sometimes disparaging, of Indian herbal remedies. These sources reflect a persistent tension between medical practices inside and outside of accepted scientific spheres. Vogel wishes to make a larger point here, however. He cites the increasing interest in native knowledge of medical botany among elites at the American Philosophical Society and medical students at the University of Pennsylvania to show that this interest was of a “nationalistic spirit” rather than “romantic interest.” That is, American political independence from Europe led to a search for independence in science and medicine also. This, in turn, led Philadelphia’s scientific community to collect Native-American knowledge in hopes of generating a fully home-grown materia medica.
While historians of early American science might find this formulation overly simplistic, and historians of medicine and botany may express skepticism about the “real” impact of indigenous knowledge on elite medical practices of the time, Vogel does a service to those wishing to understand healing in 18th-century Philadelphia. He both presents a historical puzzle to be solved — the explosion of interest in Native-American remedies in scientific and medical circles — and provides evidence for the wider cultural circulation of Indian medicine in the worlds of domestic medicine and "quackery". Vogel’s work helps to illustrate that the historian trying to reconstruct the past must be cognizant of his/her own assumptions, the biases of his/her sources, and the strengths and weaknesses of his/her arguments. To try your hand at interpreting some of the same sources that Vogel used, see the exercise in this section of the website.
A note on nomenclature in Native American history: As Vogel’s book demonstrates, the term “Indian” is used by scholars despite the fact that “Native American” is generally more socially accepted when speaking or referring to a person of this lineage in the present. Most historians, as we have done in this section of the website, use both terms more or less interchangeably. Reasons for this include avoiding redundancy when referring to a group of people multiple times, providing the terms that one’s “historical actors” would have used, and recognizing that “Native American” does not solve the problem of finding an accurate category for these populations. (i.e. naming a group of people after a European map-maker is not intrinsically “better” than naming them after a region of Asia). This is not to say, however, that historians and other scholars are absolved of responsibility for continuing to seek more appropriate ways to refer to their actors. Continuing to use “Indian” is problematic and imperfect, and the solution to this dilemma must certainly reflect sensitivity to all people subject to, and affected by, historical analysis.