Indians gave settlers remedies

Dying to Head WestFRONTIER MEDICINE
From the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941
By David Dary
Knopf. 381 pp. $30

Though some were inclined to view Indians as savages, settlers were not surprised to find native remedies effective; after all, Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries believed in a Law of Correspondences, which held that cures could be often found in the same locales where diseases occur. Among the native medicines adopted by many colonists, according to Dary, were a combination of animal grease and powdered hellebore root for wounds and the dried root bark of the wahoo tree as a mild purgative and heart stimulant.

Many of the earliest books to come out of the English colonies between 1670 and 1740 were natural histories documenting medicinal plants. The first American self-help manual may have been "Every Man His Own Doctor; Or, The Poor Planter's Physician," published in 1734 by John Tennent, who had arrived in Virginia's Spotsylvania County from England just 10 years earlier. It described many Native American herbal remedies, including chewing willow bark for headaches, applying witch hazel to sore muscles and eating raspberries to control diarrhea. But the most enduringly popular of these books was "Gunn's Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man's Friend," which remained continuously in print from 1830 to 1920 and is mentioned in both Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and John Steinbeck's "East of Eden."Comment:  For more on the subject, see Multicultural Origins of Civilization and The Best Indian Books.