Chapter XXXIV

MEDICAL TREATMENT

The bulk of the important doctoring was done by shamans or medicine men. This was all based on supernatural faith and fear. As we know from advances of our modern civilization in the field of psychosomatic medicine, such “in the mind” cures were highly effective in practice. With all due respect to the modern medical profession, it is a foregone conclusion that from 50% to 75% of the patients of today’s general medical doctor are going to get well eventually without any bonafide medical treatment anyway. This percentage favored the shamans too.

Besides shamans there were secondary Indian doctors called herbalists. Among Atsugewi, these persons did not have the power of shamans, and could not cure disease, but only check or weaken it. However, this class of doctor did administer various medicines internally and externally, and gave treatments which may actually have been—in some cases—of benefit beyond mere faith healing. These remedies were handed down, as was all Indian knowledge, by word of mouth from generation to generation. Old men taught the young.

Herbalists were able to make snake bite victims recover; treatment included sucking the wound. Cauterization or burning of affected parts was practiced. Atsugewi treated rheumatism in patients with vapor baths in a trench of hot coals on which pine needles and yerba santa or mountain balm branches were placed, with a robe over all.

Mountain Maidu smoked wild parsnip for headaches, colds, and wounds. Mountain Maidu and Atsugewi believed that toothaches were caused by the presence of worms in the teeth. Corrective poultices were placed on the cheek. Yana did this too, but placed a hot stone on the poultice, and also bit on a mole’s front foot, dried, to relieve the pain. Atsugewi often set the poultice on fire which might leave permanent scars.

The seeds of rosinweed, a member of the sunflower family, were collected, then shelled, cooked, dried, and finally pounded. This medicine was taken for chills. Wild iris roots were chewed raw for coughing.

Decoctions, that is, water in which plants had been boiled to extract their medicinal juices, were drunk. California angelica, a member of the parsley family, was used in this way for colds, diarrhea, headache, et cetera. This medication was popular with all local tribes for treating many ills.

Yana used poultices of roots of bracken fern, pounded and warmed for application to burns. The bulbs of false solomon seal were pounded fine and also hot soap-root poultices were applied to swellings, pains, or boils. Peeled California angelica roots were crushed and laid on aching heads.

Ground squirrel grease was used to soften rough hands and to relieve cracking of the skin from chapping.

Atsugewi employed green leaves of chokecherry, pounded as poultices, for cuts, sores, and bruises. The boiled liquor of pounded chokecherry bark was used for bathing wounds to promote healing.

They employed decoctions of wormwood to prevent blood poisoning and to treat cuts. Decoctions of greenleaf manzanita leaves were good for cuts and burns. Both oak bark and oak gall decoctions were drunk to prevent infection and catching colds and were given to women in childbirth. Atsugewi also chewed raw juniper berries as a treatment for colds.

Obviously there was a host of other treatments as we know of a large variety of other plants, roots, and fruits which were used medicinally.

Broken bones were set as best they could be set, and were bound up in simple but effective splints.

For general good health Garth states that an Atsugewi “... man chewed the top shoot off a young pine tree. Especially was this done by a father after his wife bore a child.”

In Yana sweat houses and probably in those of other tribes too, veins were cut with obsidian chips to “let the bad blood out” if a person felt ill.