From the very first contacts between the Old and the New World, European doctors recognized that the Indians held the key to the world's most sophisticated pharmacy. Medicine in most of the world at that time had not yet risen far above witchcraft and alchemy. In Europe, physicians talked about the balance of body humors as they attached living leeches to the patient in order to suck out the "bad blood." Moslem doctors burned their patients with hot charcoals, and physicians in the Orient prescribed elaborate potions of dragon bones....By contrast the Indians of America had refined a complex set of active drugs that produced physiological...effects in the patient. This cornucopia of new pharmaceutical agents became the basis for modern medicine and pharmacology. [T]he Indian cures and medicines...circled the world and...fully integrated into cultures on every continent. The medicines became so taken for granted that it was easy to forget that they had not always been there and that they had not been discovered or invented by Old World doctors. In addition to employing the sophisticated medicine chest..., native doctors also understood and practiced many medical arts, some of which were still unknown in the Old World. One of the most unusual of these was the brain surgery or trephining performed by surgeons in varied Indian civilizations.
-Jack Weatherford
from the article Providing for the Health Care Needs of Native Americans: Policy, Programs, Procedures, and Practices by Rose L. Pfefferbaum, Betty Pfefferbaum,
Everett R. Rhoades and Rennard J. Strickland
American Indian Law Review Vol.21, No.2 (1997), pp.211-258
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