Materia Médica And Therapy Among The North American Forest Indians.

The author suggests that the medical notions and curative efforts of all North American Indians have one common feature, the presence of two distinct approaches to healing. The two approaches are (1) metaphysical, which assumes supernatural forces are the sources of diseases, and (2) the physical, which essentially uses objective observation for deciding aetiology and therapy. A slightly abridged version of this article was read before the Comm on Med Hist and Archives, Ohio State Arch and Hist Soc, at ann'l meeting on 4/28/51.