Historiographic Overview
For students and teachers, this section provides examples of the secondary literature on this topic. In general, this essay serves as an overview of some of the issues relevant to this subject.
Overview: Native-American Medicine
Histories that deal with health, illness, and medicine in America, especially in the colonial and early republic eras, often make passing mention of Native Americans as healers or sources of knowledge about medicinal plants. Similarly, histories of Native-American cultures and early European contact pay only cursory attention to health and healing with respect to these cross-cultural interactions, outside of disease epidemics. Very little secondary literature exists that takes the American Indian materia medica as its primary subject (An important, and often cited, exception here is Virgil Vogel’s 1970 American Indian Medicine (Vogel). When this subject is taken up in the historical literature, it is often an attempt to assess the impact of Native-American knowledge of New World herbs on the knowledge and practice of early-American elite physicians and botanists. This essay will compare these different approaches, their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss the difficulty of “doing history” on a topic obscured by time, competing perspectives, and available evidence.
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Examples of a few important historical works will help to illuminate the multiple approaches to these topics (an annotated, representative list of material related to Native-American medicine can be found here. All books and articles referenced in this essay can be found on this list ). First, there is a significant body of historical literature, much of it developed in the last thirty-five years, that deals with Native American cultures in the past. James Axtell’s 2001 Natives and newcomers: the cultural origins of North America is a good example of recent historical scholarship on Native Americans during the colonial period and the relationships between Indians and European colonists (Axtell). As a broad history of this exchange, Natives and newcomers devotes only a small amount of space to discuss Native-American healing practices and medicinal knowledge. In a brief passage on page 323, for example, Axtell describes a few of the ways that Indian knowledge about prevention and cure of illness on the “frontier” aided the early English colonizers. Continuing on the same page and citing Vogel, he concludes that “Most of the cures were bona fide. At least 170 indigenous drugs listed in the official Pharmacopeia of the United States were discovered and used by the Indians north of Mexico, the great majority in the eastern woodlands.” Here we have an example of a history that treats Native-American medical knowledge briefly, but as an important aspect of cultural exchange.
Similarly, some broad histories of medicine in America also make brief mention of Native-American medicine. Paul Starr’s 1982 The Social Transformation of American Medicine, for example, includes a passage on “Indian Doctors” and Native American botanical knowledge (Starr). On pages 48 and 49, he cites early 18th-century American and English writers to show that Indians were considered to have special and effective knowledge of medicinal plants in the New World. He also points out that the emergence of white “Indian doctors” attempting to sell their herbal remedies as cures passed down from Native Americans indicated the power of the Indian-as-herbalist ideal in colonial culture. John Duffy’s 1976 The Healers: the Rise of the Medical Establishment is an earlier, general history of American medicine (Duffy). Duffy’s book spends a little more time on Native-American medicine, however, opening with a short chapter titled “The Myth of Indian Medicine.” He takes a more “presentist” view of Native-American healing, attempting to judge the likely efficacy of Indian medicine from a modern standpoint and using the term “myth” in its derogatory sense to mean that Americans have incorrectly maintained a belief in the effectiveness of those healing practices. Thus, these two histories of medicine are somewhat at odds. Where Starr sees “Indian doctor” mythology as indicative of ideas that carried weight in early American culture, Duffy’s “medical establishment” framework allows little room for Indian medicine.
While these examples show broad Native-American history and history of medicine literature that mentions Native Americans, a few other scholars have taken up more specific topics related to this subject. David L. Cowan’s article “The impact of the materia medica of the North American Indians on professional practice,” for example, attempts a quantitative analysis of contributions to the medical profession from Native American botanical knowledge (Cowan). Andrew J. Lewis, in an article titled “Gathering for the Republic: Botany in Early Republic America,” addresses a similar issue by weighing in on the likely influence of local, Indian knowledge on scientific botany in early America (Schiebinger and Swan). The upshot of these articles is that indigenous knowledge had very little impact on “professional” medicine and science during this time period. This conclusion seems almost inevitable, however, given the questions that Cowan and Lewis are asking and the nature of the documentary evidence available. That is, reading documents written by elite physicians and botanists, like Philadelphia’s Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Smith Barton (see commentary), one sees that references to Indian medical and botanical knowledge common in the mid-18th century began to drop out in the late 18th/early-19th century as professional language became more “medicalized” and “scientific”. It is not surprising, then, that few direct references to indigenous knowledge remained in the literature by the early 1800's. Furthermore, couching the “impact” or “value” of Native-American knowledge in terms of quantities of medicinal plants traceable back to indigenous sources in the professional literature ignores the larger, qualitative presence of Indian medicine in the social environment of the times. This is not to say that the arguments that Cowan and Lewis make are not accurate or useful, but it is worth pointing out that the available documentary evidence, the documents historians choose to use, and the questions historians choose to ask all shape the conclusions that they reach.
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Individually, when dwelling upon specific aspects of Native-American medicine in the colonies and discussing Indian remedies to specific diseases in terms of their “impact” on American medicine more generally, these works generally marginalize indigenous knowledge and occasionally contradict each other. Taken as a whole, however, the historical work that has directly or indirectly addressed Native-American medicine reveals that Indians’ knowledge of New World plants captured the attention of early-American physicians and medical botanists, impressed settlers and missionaries, entered into “folk” healing practices, was woven into European mythologies about America’s indigenous populations, was incorporated into the American pharmacopoeia, and at times even saved the lives of European travelers. Just as a variety of primary sources must be assembled and compared to form a more complete picture of a particular aspect of history in the social realm, a wide range of these historical works must sometimes be consulted and compared to gain a broader understanding of a historical field in general. To use the examples cited above, the evidence for direct influence of Native-American medicine on professional practice in the 18th century is an interesting, and contested, small-scale historical question. For the purposes of a large-scale social history of healing practices, however, these arguments somewhat miss the point. Consulting all the available sources indicates that Native-American ways of knowing altered the social world of health and healing on multiple levels of early American society.
Note: for an interesting perspective along these lines on Native Americans in American history more generally, see James Axtell, “Colonial America without the Indians: Counterfactual Reflections,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 73, No. 4. (Mar., 1987), pp. 981-996.