MEDICINE MAN, among the American Indians, South Sea Island tribes and other sav ages, a man supposed to possess mysterious healing powers. Among most savages the medi cine man occupies much the same position as that held in civilized communities by two of the learned professions — medical and clerical. The medicine man is both priest and physician, and is at once the repository of all that a tribe knows, fears and believes. In very low stages of human development, however, he is at best only a magician, dealing , in terrors, possessed of occult powers, but laying claim to no speoa: medical knowledge. Thus, among the aborig ines of North Queensland, the tribal doctors attend on the sick — an invalid being cared for by wife or mother. They are not tious, a medicine man being distinguished by no insignia save a small bag for his talismans. death charms and other °credentials.* Among the North American Indians medicine met are treated with great respect, and form a secret society with exclusive privil and °exercise a terrible influence in nit the people? It is curious to find that, as in Australia, the Indian medicine men are chiefly concerned to do positive harm. In co-operation
with good and bad spirits, they bring about the deaths of men or dogs at a distance. Among the Ojibways they are a kind of brokers in vengeance, and a coward or a hypocrite who wishes to be covertly avenged upon an enemy will bribe his tribal medicine man to employ the medical attendant of his victim. Then. if the victim dies, the instigators remain, unsuspected, and the actual perpetrator of the crime probably goes scot free. Indian medicine men affect to suck out poison from a patient's body, or they cough up an arrow point or small, sharp piece of stone or bone which they suppose has been transferred from him to them by the evil spirit of another sorcerer. The medicine men of the Eskimos are even more extravagant in their pretensions. They profess 'themselves able to change into wood, stone or animal, or even to walk on the water, or to fly, but they make a condition, which is that °no one must see them? See INDIANS.