American Indian Contributions to the World, Part 3: Medicine and Health
Continuing on, more highlights from Emory Dean Keoke's and Kay Marie Porterfield's American Indian Contributions to the World. (Previous installments: Trade, Transportation, and Welfare; Food, Farming, and Hunting. Definitions of 'American Indian', 'contribution', and 'world' here.)
Medicine and Health
NB: This list is shorter than the other two, for two reasons. First, I'm largely skipping the chapters on surgery and personal hygiene, because it turns out that pretty much everybody but Europe was doing that. (But then I read quotes like this, about how everyone but American Indians gets to have "civilizations", and wonder if I should put those items back in this list again.)
Second, there's the question for me of what items will be familiar to my readers here, and in what associations. Unfortunately, cultural appropriators, with their own special racist stereotypes that "elves Indians were wild, pure, and mystical," have tarnished the reputation of many American Indian medical treatments. Keoke and Porterfield do a nice job of sorting out the actualities from the appropriations, but because I'm not supplying any explanations or histories in this post, I'm leaving those items off this list.
I do want to say, however, that the section about historical appropriation in this volume is nicely drawn, beginning with the reputation of American Indian medicine among U.S. colonials as being superior to colonial medicine -- discussion of relative child mortality there -- and moving on to how the patent medicine industry took advantage of that perception by marketing most patent medicines as if they were Indian in origin. (They weren't.) Abuses by the patent medicine industry then led to the formation of the FDA and the medical establishment's rejection of American Indian medicine, even though it wasn't American Indian medicine that was the actual problem (but patent medicines developed by white charlatans who would then slap a picture of a Mohawk on the label).
But enough with the editorial notes. Have a list:
Pellagra prevention. Scurvy treatment. Childbed fever prevention. Wound infection prevention. Quarantine.
Echinacea. Wintergreen. Witch hazel. Jojoba. Guarana. Sassafras. Chicle.
Quinine. Ipecac. Papain (OTC insect sting treatments). Cascara sagrada (OTC laxative). Guaiacol (OTC expectorant). Pilocarpine (glaucoma treatment). ETA: birth control hormones; artificial steroids to treat asthma, arthritis, and rheumatism.
Anesthetics: Datura. Peyote. Cocaine and related synthetics (e.g. procaine/novocaine).
Root beer. Sarsaparilla. Tonic water. Cocawine. Coca-cola. Chewing gum.
Arthrocentesis. Scar revision. Cotton gauze. Pharmaceutical capsules.
ETA: Because the linkspam keeps overwhelming individual archivists, the archivists are fighting back and have moved the linkspam to a community, where multiple archivists can share the work: Linkspam (Dreamwidth community) and linkspam_feed.
Medicine and Health
NB: This list is shorter than the other two, for two reasons. First, I'm largely skipping the chapters on surgery and personal hygiene, because it turns out that pretty much everybody but Europe was doing that. (But then I read quotes like this, about how everyone but American Indians gets to have "civilizations", and wonder if I should put those items back in this list again.)
Second, there's the question for me of what items will be familiar to my readers here, and in what associations. Unfortunately, cultural appropriators, with their own special racist stereotypes that "elves Indians were wild, pure, and mystical," have tarnished the reputation of many American Indian medical treatments. Keoke and Porterfield do a nice job of sorting out the actualities from the appropriations, but because I'm not supplying any explanations or histories in this post, I'm leaving those items off this list.
I do want to say, however, that the section about historical appropriation in this volume is nicely drawn, beginning with the reputation of American Indian medicine among U.S. colonials as being superior to colonial medicine -- discussion of relative child mortality there -- and moving on to how the patent medicine industry took advantage of that perception by marketing most patent medicines as if they were Indian in origin. (They weren't.) Abuses by the patent medicine industry then led to the formation of the FDA and the medical establishment's rejection of American Indian medicine, even though it wasn't American Indian medicine that was the actual problem (but patent medicines developed by white charlatans who would then slap a picture of a Mohawk on the label).
But enough with the editorial notes. Have a list:
Pellagra prevention. Scurvy treatment. Childbed fever prevention. Wound infection prevention. Quarantine.
Echinacea. Wintergreen. Witch hazel. Jojoba. Guarana. Sassafras. Chicle.
Quinine. Ipecac. Papain (OTC insect sting treatments). Cascara sagrada (OTC laxative). Guaiacol (OTC expectorant). Pilocarpine (glaucoma treatment). ETA: birth control hormones; artificial steroids to treat asthma, arthritis, and rheumatism.
Anesthetics: Datura. Peyote. Cocaine and related synthetics (e.g. procaine/novocaine).
Root beer. Sarsaparilla. Tonic water. Cocawine. Coca-cola. Chewing gum.
Arthrocentesis. Scar revision. Cotton gauze. Pharmaceutical capsules.
ETA: Because the linkspam keeps overwhelming individual archivists, the archivists are fighting back and have moved the linkspam to a community, where multiple archivists can share the work: Linkspam (Dreamwidth community) and linkspam_feed.