The Midwest pioneer, his ills, cures, & doctors - University Library ...

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Followed more wandering. At Lynchburg he first saw
the smallpox and was impressed. After almost drowning
on the way home, he again entered school and applied himself
for two six-months' terms. He then went to live with
an uncle on the "headwaters of Marietta." Here for several
months he studied botany—the power and use of herbs.
Several more months he spent with an "Indian Doctoress"
and an Indian doctor who possessed "great skill in pulsation."
Under these preceptors the student worked hard;
also at night in books left by his father, "applying myself so
intensively . . . that I was very near producing a caterack
in my eyes." He had a good memory and retained much of
what he was taught.
On returning from a trip to Carolina, Carter, as a result
of wading many streams, lost his health. Soreness in the
breast and swelling in the stomach alternated with dysentery
and prolonged constipation. Some thought he was
poisoned. Neither an Indian doctor nor a local practitioner
could help. The sufferer's pulse was about gone and so was
he, when another doctor applied a "glister ... of green
bitter gord guts," whereupon he shortly passed a
"gallon
of blood and corruption," and, though the doctor predicted
he would die about midnight, proceeded to live. Months
of torture followed. A water doctor told him his liver was
destroyed and that he was bound to die. "It is an awful
thing to reflect on seeing our friends lingering around our
bed, waiting to take their final farewell— to feel your
tongue cleave to the rough of your mouth, and the blood
settling under your nales— your cheeks pale, your lips
blue, and your hands clinched, and your breathing perceptibly
growing shorter."
With nerves weakened, pains and running sores in the
chest, sores on the hips, inward fevers, dysentery, tremblings
in the lungs, and a palpitating heart, the patient was
in a fairly bad way. Mercury given by a physician he threw
away, but a friend skilled in herbs prescribed a brew of
dewberry briar roots, burdock roots, wild cherry bark,