During Thursday's presentation on the article, "Avoiding smallpox spirits: colonial epidemics and southeastern indian survival," I throughly enjoyed hearing about the four nations used their spirituality to explain and cope with the disease that, in some cases, ravaged their societies. I also really liked how the presenter mentioned that while many of their strategies were of "high powers, " they still were based in logic.
But I started feeling that there was something missing. Unless I wasn't paying attention, I never heard the presenter discuss what methods native peoples used to cure diseases, particularly smallpox. We've briefly discussed in class that Western medicine at the time was rather ineffective, but why? And how was native medicine useful? What techniques did they incorporate? Are those techniques still prevalent today?
2 comments:
I also felt that I had missed something in the discussion about the remedies used to fight smallpox. In looking over my notes and the readings I found that we did only discuss a few of the ways that each group tried to fight the epidemic. It seems as if the Europeans just waited for someone to die once they got the disease. On method they did use for sure was "bleeding" which was ineffective because platelet counts are low with the disease so the person has trouble clotting and stopping the bleeding. Europeans also lived in more enclosed communities causing the disease to spread faster. The most effective method of treatment was quarantining done by the natives which was practiced after the failure of more traditional methods such as sweat lodges and plant remedies. We didn't go into much detail on any of the methods of treatment but because most methods were ineffective there might not be a lot of detail to go into.
I really enjoyed your comment. I also feel that I am a spiritual person and that I equate many things to happenings that are beyond our control or are directly influenced by such factors. The genius behind their technique for establishing reasons for why and who was bringing these terrible diseases were actually rather accurate. They reflect, to me, how resiliant and those peoples were and their ability to adapt to whatever was thrown their way always had a rhyme/reason, nothing was completely out of their sphere that they felt they couldn't handle. Very impressive!
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