Shut your mouth and save your life / by George Catlin.

  • George Catlin
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Shut your mouth and save your life / by George Catlin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    women never die in childbirth, and they do not allow Doctors to attend them on such occasions.5 Pood of this Tribe, fish, venison, and vegetables. Kee-mon-saiv, Chief of the KaskasJcias, on the Mis- souri, once a powerful and warlike Tribe, told me that he could recollect when the children of his Tribe were very numerous and very healthy, and they had then no Idiots, no Deaf and Dumb, no Hunch-backs; but that the small-pox and whiskey had killed off the men and women, and the children died very fast. ‘ My mother,5 said he, ‘ who is very old, and my little son and myself, all of whom are now before you, are all that are left in my Tribe, and I am the Chief!5 The above, which are but a very few of the numer- ous estimates which I have gathered, when compared with the statistics of premature deaths and mental and physical deformities in civilized communities, form a contrast so striking between the sanitary conditions of the two Races, who are born the same, and whose terms of natural life are intended to be equal, as plainly to show, that through the vale of their existence, in civilized Races, there must be some hidden cause of disease not yet sufficiently appreciated, and which the Materia Medicci has not effectually reached. Under this conviction I have been stimulated to search amongst the Savage Races for the causes of their