like diseases" the cure was to build a stove
"in the form of a dovehouse with mats, so close that a fewe coales
therein covered with a pot, will make the pacient sweate extreamely."

Before lighting his stove, the Indian covered his sweating place with
bark so close that no air could enter. When he began to sweat
profusely, the sick Indian dashed out from his heated shelter and into
a nearby creek, sea, or river. An Englishman commented that after
returning to his hut again he "either recover[s] or give[s] up the
ghost."

The Indians, like Moliere's stage physician, believed in the value of
the purge. Every spring they deliberately made themselves sick with
drinking the juices of a medicinal root. The dosage purged them so
thoroughly that they did not recover until three or four days later.
The Indians also ate green corn in the spring to work the same effect.

The Indian medicine man, like his European counterpart, frequently
dispensed medicines or drugs. As has been the custom among many men in
the medical profession, the medicine man would not reveal the secrets
of his medicines. "Made very knowing in the hidden qualities of plants
and other natural things," he considered it a part of the obligations
of his priesthood to conceal the information from all but those who
were to succeed him. On the other hand, the Indian priest showed his
concern for the health of his people--and the similarity of his
attitude to that of present day practices--by making an exception to
his canon of secrecy in the case of drugs needed in emergencies arising
on a hunting trip and during travel.

According to one early eighteenth-century history of Virginia, the
Indian in choosing raw materials for drugs preferred roots and barks of
trees to the leaves of plants or trees. If the drug were to be taken
internally it was mixed with water; when juices were to be applied
externally they were left natural unless water was necessary for
moistening. Whatever the drug and however utilized, the Indian called
it _wisoccan_ or _wighsacan_, for this term was not a specific herb,
as some of the earlier settlers thought, but a general term.

Besides sassafras, medicinal roots and barks, the Indian believed in
beneficial effects of a kind of clay called _wapeig_. The clay, in the
opinion of the Indians, cured sores and wounds; an English settler
marvelled to find in use "a strange kind of earth, the vertue whereof I
know not; but the Indians eate it f