La Médecine de l'Amérique précolombienne

In a literal sense the term Pre-Columbian refers to the period of the history of the Western Hemisphere from the earliest times to 1492, when Christopher Columbus set foot on the New World. In a wider sense, however, pre-Columbian commonly applies to the pre-acculturation period, before the native populations bore the full brunt of European colonization. Due to the staggered waves of exploration and conquest, extending from the fifteenth century to about the nineteenth, the 'historic' or post-contact period for such areas thus differs widely, Central and Northeastern America bearing the white man's influence very early, while until less than a century ago purely aboriginal-therefore in a sense pre-Columbian-culture could be encountered on the Northwest Coast. Whatever the date of contact, it is now accepted that the multitude of different tribes and peoples that inhabited the Americas, from the Eskimo North to the Southern pampas, had a long-established culture, and in certain cases an advanced civilization of their own. Maya-Aztec Mexico and the Incas of Peru are the best known, but other early foci of advanced art and social structure are now being discovered or rediscovered and are beginning to receive due attention. Thus, the prehistoric products of the arctic Thule culture and the totemic art of the North Pacific coast are now regarded among the rare group of superlative achievement by any standard. To varying degrees of development all these areas and cultures had their medicine too. With its blend of medico-religious practices, shrewd empiricism, judicious use of available plant and animal products, and an intuitive interpretation of nature, native medicine cannot have been inferior to the contemporary pseudo-medico-chirurgical alchemy imported by the early conquerors, missionaries and so-called men of physick. Indeed it is a fair guess that with his keen sense of observation and respect for nature, the Amerindian healer probably stood a better chance of succeeding. Yet however advanced or retarded these areas might have been in the healing arts, they can rarely have passed the stage of 'primitive medicine'-primitive both in the restrictive sense of non-scientific healing, and the wider sense of medico-religious magic. Until Europeans and white Americans colonized any area, and sometimes well after this, the primitive and traditional forms of native medicine persisted. In his La Midecine de l'Amgrique pricolombienne Charles Coury, Professor of the History of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Paris, presents a comprehensive and beautifully compiled account of …