The aborigines are familiar with, and practise extensively, the use of warm fomentations. In every tribe their old women are credited with the possession of a knowledge of local bathing with hot water, and of medicated decoctions. The herbs they use are known to a privileged few, and enhance the consideration in which their possessors are held.
The Turkish bath, in a simpler but not less effective form, is well known to them. If one of their tribe suffers from fever, or from the effects of long exposure to cold, a steam bath is readily improvised. The tent of deer-skin is tightly closed; the patient is placed in one corner: heated stones are put near him, and on these water is poured till the confined air is saturated with vapour. Any degree of heat and any degree of moisture can be obtained in this way. Europeans often avail themselves of this powerful sudatory when suffering from rheumatism.
The aborigines have their herbs—a few, not many. They have their emetics and laxatives, astringents and emollients—all of which are proffered to the suffering without fee or reward. The “Indian teas,” “Indian balsams,” and other Indian “cure-alls”—the virtues of which it sometimes takes columns of the daily journals to chronicle—are not theirs. To the white man is left this species of deception.[88]
Mr. E. Palmer says that there is a tribe of Australian aborigines, called “Kalkadoona,” adjoining the Mygoodano tribe of the Cloncurry, who practise certain surgical operations at their _Bora_ initiations of youths. They operate on the urethra with flint knives. The same custom can be traced from the Cloncurry River to the Great Australian Bight in the south. The females are in some of the south-western tribes operated on in some manner to prevent conception. It is supposed that the ovary is taken out, as in the operation of spaying.[89]
Such operations are sometimes performed with a mussel-shell.
Sir John Lubbock says of the Society Islanders that “they had no knowledge of medicine as distinct from witchcraft; but some wonderful stories are told of their skill in surgery. I will give perhaps the most extraordinary. ‘It is related,’ says Mr. Ellis, ‘although,’ he adds with perfect gravity, ‘I confess I can scarcely believe it, that on some occasions, when the brain has been injured as well as the bone, they have opened the skull, taken out the injured portion of the brain, and, having a pig ready, have killed it, taken out the pig’s brains, put them in the man’s head and covered them up.’”[90]