Venereal Disease and the Lewis and Clark Expedition

4. Indian Medicine

4 Indian Medicine Lewis and Clark lived in a time unimaginable to us. It was not just the total absence of steam, gas, electric, or nuclear power, not just theabsenceofdailypostalservice,telegraph,radio,telephone,typewriter , computers, and television, but the painfully limited means of finding information. Today, data on nearly every subject can be found in milliseconds through Internet search engines. Public libraries are filled with referenceworks on hundreds of subjects.Universityand state libraries have periodicals in every imaginable area of knowledge. Bookstores are eager to sell or order any of one hundred thousand titles. Contrast this with Lewis and Clark’s database. In spite of access to the country’s best library and most knowledgeable consultants, the explorers’ sum total of knowledge of Native American remedies for venereal disease was merely Lobelia and sumach. Part of the problem was the limitations of local translation and the absence of uniform names for plants, but much of the problem was ignorance (of course unintentional) of what had gone before. And much had gone before. non-venereal remedies In the bitter winter of 1535, Jacques Cartier and the ships of his expedition of French explorers were frozen in the ice near Montreal. By spring, twenty-five men had died of scurvy and the rest were near death from the same cause. The Indians showed the French 47 48 Indian Medicine how to brew a tea from the bark of a certain fir tree, and the men were soon restored to health. Lawrence Bohun, the first physician at the English settlement at Jamestown,Virginia, extolled the virtues of sassafras and wild rhubarb for nearly every illness. Sixty-seven yearsbeforeLewiswentuptheMissouriRiver,Dr.JohnTennentwas awarded one hundred pounds (a vast sum then) by the Virginia AssemblyforhisessayonSenecasnakeroot (Polygalasenega).TheIndian who taught Tennent how to treat lung disease with snakeroot got nothing.1 Almost two decades before the grim New England coast became home to the even grimmer Pilgrims, a Captain Goswold was harvestingshiploadsofsassafrasonthosesameshoresandsailinghome with enough to depress the London sassafras market. Sassafras, said to be curative of fevers, ulcers, seizures, dropsy, scurvy, malaria, gout, rheumatism, and the pox, was, in the early days of America, a more important export than tobacco. In the early 1700s, large quantities of Indian pinkroot (Spigelia marilandica) were exported from the Carolinas and used as a remedy for intestinal worms. Pinkroot continued to be an official remedy in the American pharmacopoeia until 1926. Many writers and explorers three centuries ago also made note of the medicinal qualities of tansy, white oak, cherry bark, dogwood bark, and beech leaves. Much more knowledge has probably been lost, partly from the Indians’ understandable reluctance to share hard-won knowledge with the often-hostile whites, and partly because the missionaries regarded the tribes’ medicine men as devil worshipers or agents of Satan. However, our arena here is not the whole scope of medical practice , but more specifically the ailments of Aphrodite. If Lewis and Clark had had full access to American Indian treatment of venereal diseases,hereispartofwhattheywouldhaveknown.Whetherthese 49 Indian Medicine remedies actually cured venereal diseases is not easy to answer, but true cures seem unlikely, as with Anglo-American medical practice of the time. remedies for syphilis In 1630, Martin Pring described sassafras (Sassafras officinalis) as ‘‘a plant of sovereigne vertue for the French Poxe.’’2 Benjamin Barton, a student of the ‘‘Northern Indians,’’ reported the use of a decoction of Indian snakeroot (probably Aristolochia serpentaria) as a treatment for syphilis. To further confuse these issues, at least nine different plants were commonlycalled ‘‘snakeroot.’’ Thomas Ash, in 1682, described the use of China root (Smilax tamnoides) as a remedy for the ‘‘lues venerea [syphilis] in the Carolinas.’’3 The earliest writings of the Spanish conquistadores mention guaicum as a treatment for syphilis, a disease that the Spanish themselves may have brought. Oviedo’s 1526 Natural History described large forests of the ‘‘holy wood’’(guaic)inHispaniola.JohnLawsoninhis1714Historyof North Carolina described the Indians as curing syphilis with a berry that caused salivation and with the juice of the tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera). Peter Kalm, in 1770, claimed that the Indians had ‘‘an infallibleart ’’inthecuringofvenerealdiseaseanddescribedamixture of Lobelia and Queen’s root (Stillingia sylvatica) used for this purpose . The French botanist André Michaux, traveling through the American wilderness in 1775, recorded certain cure of syphilis by two plants: ‘‘Sanicula marilandia [possibly Spigelia] and the root of Veronica virginiana.’’4 FifteenyearsafterLewisandClark’sjourney,Dr.EdwinJameswas retracing...