Camaban

Leeches are still extremely useful.

just not as all-encompassing as they used to be. (for a bit of humour on this, see Blackadder, Series 2 - Bells)

Dr Rick

Can you even believe it?! It's almost like creationists are irrational or something...

Rick

lpetrich

Herbal medicine is not pure quackery, since many useful medicines had been discovered by that route. If one examines enough species of plants, one will eventually discover something useful. However, one still ought to have critical sense about it.

Nevertheless, there is evidence that various nonhuman species medicate themselves; investigation of this field has been named "zoopharmacology".

As to the "Native Americans" / "American Indians" (anyone for "Skraelings"?), most of them had lived in a fashion that made it difficult for contagious diseases to get well-established.

They had lived in widely-scattered small groups, thus making it difficult for some half-adapted disease organism to spread.

European settlers had become carriers of troublesome diseases because their ancestors had lived in large groups for centuries, which easily enables half-adapted disease organisms to spread.

For the most part, the spread of smallpox, cholera, and the like was inadvertent; the only case of anti-Indian biological warfare I know of was someone giving some smallpox-patient blankets to infect some Great Lakes Indians with smallpox.

There were some big-city-building Indians, like the Aztecs and the Incas; if they had lasted long enough, they may eventually have acquired various disease organisms and become carriers of nasty diseases.

Imagine the Incas suffering from an epidemic of some disease they caught from their llamas; I'll call it "llama pox" in analogy with cowpox.

If they had lived in small groups, then a group that gets llama pox would either die or completely recover without having contacted many others, thus containing that epidemic.

But the Incas had lived in bigger communities, and those suffering from llama pox could easily infect others, who could in turn easily infect others, and so forth. This would mean that there would always be some llama pox floating around, and eventually, the Incas would become carriers of it.

It's rather difficult to go from the central Andes to Mexico, but if some llama-pox carriers had made it to Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, they would have devastated the Aztecs with an epidemic of llama pox.

And when Pizarro and his friends came knocking on the Incas' doors, they might come down with llama pox. And if they survive, they could even return home and cause an epidemic of llama pox in Europe.

Finally, as to Indians and bathing, I wonder if bathing was only common among those who lived near big bodies of water.

Dr Rick

Approximately 1/3 of all prescription medications (ie digoxin, cyclosporine) and 2/3 of all non-prescription medications (ie aspirin, senna) in the USA are herbal derivatives.

Rick

mibby529

I was born on a reservation, as if my "from" field doesn't tell you that. Quite frankly, the anthropologists I've met are arrogant, dogmatic, and didactic. Even though I despise Star Wars's lack of characterization and cheap stereotypes (scoundrel, princess, commoner who saves princess, old mystic, etc.) you must un-learn what you have learned.

Dr Rick

[quote]Originally posted by mibby529:
<strong>pot, kettle, black.

pz

I am trusting that you are a native American, as you say -- I have no reason to believe otherwise. However, being born on a reservation now does not give you any special knowledge of native American life before 1500.

I have no idea why you think your complaint about anthropologists has any relevance here, and your non sequitur about Star Wars is just bizarre.

scigirl

Do you have any data to back this up? That's not what I learned in my graduate level course titled "microbial pathogenesis."

scigirl

GeoTheo

I remember reading an article about a skull found in North America believed to be 40,000 years old.
It was believed that the person had syphillis. Somthing about scarring in the nasal passages.

MrDarwin

lpetrich makes some excellent points. To them I would like to add that humans entered the Americas as small migrating populations (note that sick people don't travel well) into a habitat that had never had humans and then spent several tens of thousands of years in isolation from other human populations.

Contrast this to the Old World, where humans have existed for hundreds of thousands (most of the O.W.) or even millions (Africa) of years, because that's where we evolved. That's a lot more time for diseases to evolve and spread.

But there were no fatal diseases in the Americas? Native americans bathed every day? I'd like to know where these assertions are coming from. Also, do they apply to ALL the human populations in the Americas, e.g., the Amerindians of South America, or the tribes of the southwestern deserts?