languages. Speaking of the practices of the Medicine Man, I was informed that the cures are more a case of faith, than the result of actual knowledge,-a case of primitive Christian Science. To the Indian Medicine Man, the disease has to fit the medicine, and not the medicine the disease. The armamentarium of the healers consists of infusions and decoctions of various herbs, barks and roots, but never of animal matter. In regard to obstetrics, well, the Indian woman is rather prudish and I never had a chance to attend an Indian woman in confinement. As stated before, the Indian is not very fond of work, but there are notable exceptions to this rule, and I have known some who were hard and steady workers. The primitive Indian is still the indomitable hunter and trapper of former days. Having once scented the tracks of a wolf, fox, bear, or other wild animal, he will follow his trail until he bags his game, or loses the tracks. In his territory game laws are not in existence and he is constantly at odds with the game wardens. Next to hunting and trapping, his favorite occupation is that of gathering ginseng; ginseng has a high market value and is one of the sources of his income. With the disappearance of the woods and incidentally of the wild game the red man had to look for some other suitable occupation. It was only natural to seek employment in the nearby lumber camps. His swift eye and agile body made him quite a favorite with the lumber companies, especially as swamper and top-loader. As a farmer he is a rather poor excuse. Farming to him is a drudgery, the tending to animals requires constant attention and this is not to his liking. Just a few words in regard to the Indian medical service. Years ago the government established the Indian medical service, which is under the supervision of the Indian commissioner, whose department, in turn, is a branch of the Department of the Interior. The individual physician again is under the supervision of the superintendent of the reservation, or Indian agent. The service is the step-child of the service. Until only a year, or so, ago, the salary of the physician ranged from $1,000 to $1,200, a salary often earned by a day laborer. Again, having no professional supervision, the individual physician is left to himself; when he wants to perform his duties conscientiously, well and good; when not, no one can judge him, as in almost all instances the superintendent is a layman. On some of the reservations the government has built hospitals, which have helped greatly to provide the Indian with a better medical service. The government has also erected a tuberculosis sanatorium for Indians at Lapwai, Idaho, and an insane asylum in Kansas. Furthermore, the Indian medical service employs a few itinerant specialists; also dentists and special investigators of epidemics; but after all the Indian medical service is poor and leaves much to be desired. We may censor the Indian for his indolence and his inaptitude to adapt himself to the ways and means of the white man, but who will blame him! It seems the red man instinctively sensed the spirit of the age of the machine slave with his stock-yard district and the city slums, and shrank from it. Anyone who has ever lived in the woods and breathed the air of freedom in the Creator's palace, has feasted his eyes on the ever beautiful forests and lived on the indescribably magnificent lakes of northern Wisconsin, will only sympathize with the poor Indian. HUGO MUELLER, M. D. Rosholt, Wisconsin. PROTEOSES AND PEPTONES If your preconceived idea of Helen Keller represents her (mine didn't) as an individual who is anything but austere, radiating the intense dynamic quality of Theodore Roosevelt, and combining the spontaneous humor of Mark Twain with all the charm of Maude Adams, your preconceived idea is accurate. With her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan Macy-the Miss Sullivan whose personality is impressed on the pages of "The Story of My Life,"—Helen Keller is appearing in vaudeville, that she may carry her message of encouragement to the greatest number. Helen Keller in vaudeville? Well, why not? Mrs. Macy, whose brief sketch of Helen Keller's life and education introduces the act, is no Boswell to Helen Keller's Johnson, if, as F. P. A.'s immortal Dulcinea would say, you know what I mean. (For the enlightenment of those who can have their breakfast without the New York Tribune, be it explained that Franklin Pierce Adams is the world's most solemn writer, although most people who read his stuff think he is a humorist.) One of the characters through whom he frequently speaks is Dulcinea, who, never knowing what she means herself, qualifies with this clause the most would-be sagacious of her own statements. I can dispose of what little I know about Boswell and Johnson by designating the former as having no mission in life but to run around after the latter, writing down all the bright things he said, and depreciating himself that the illustrious lexicographer should shine the more by contrast. Well, Mrs. Macy and Helen Keller aren't like that. On the other hand, Mrs. Macy modestly fails to lay any great emphasis on the part she has played in the development of one of the most remarkable mentalities that the world has ever known. She and Helen Keller have simply worked hand in hand to conquer obstacles that less stout hearts would have regarded as insuperable, before which to lie down and die. Helen Keller was born June 27, 1880. She lost her sight and hearing at the age of nineteen months. Miss Sullivan came to her March 3, 1887, and on April 5 of the same year succeeded in making the little deaf and blind child realize that everything has a name. From that time on, the two have lived literally hand in hand. "In this way," says Mrs. Macy, illustrating by spelling into Helen Keller's hand what she is saying to the audience, "I sat by Helen's side and spelled all the lectures into her hand through the four years at Radcliffe." At which Helen Keller beams and remarks, "Some job!" far back as 1902, which is not at all compatible with the appearance of the most wonderful woman in the world, who has done in forty years what hardly any one else could do in eighty, and who looks now to be no more than a girl-a girl most fair to look upon, withal. The loss of her vision and hearing is apparently the result of some lesion within the cranial cavity, and the eyes differ from the normal in appearance only in that they are most wonderfully bright and have a peculiar stare that adds to rather than detracts from her charm. In her book she speaks of "the illness which closed my eyes and ears and plunged me into the unconsciousness of a new-born baby. They called it acute congestion of the stomach and brain. The doctor thought I could not live. Early one morning, however, the fever left me as suddenly and mysteriously as it had come. There was great rejoicing in the family that morning, but no one, not even the doctor, knew that I should never see or hear again." Between 1887, when Miss Sullivan pumped water into one of Helen Keller's hands and spelled w-a-t-e-r into the other, and 1900, when Helen Keller passed the entrance examinations for Radcliffe, the teacher and the pupil had accomplished quite a little. And at Radcliffe, from which she was graduated with honors, Helen Keller completed with normal girls on even terms. That is, if passing an entrance in algebra in which the questions were in a system of braille other than the system with the mathematical notation of which she was familiar is a sample, she competed on even terms. Some girl! In addition to the perception of speech by the manual alphabet spelled into her cupped hand, she reads the lips, also by the tactile sense. She stands at Mrs. Macy's right, with her left forefinger on the latter's thyroid cartilage, her middle finger at the angle of the mouth, and the ring finger on the upper lip. What with the fremitus at the thyroid cartilage and the movements of the mouth, in addition to a quick ability to fill in gaps from the context, she gives lively evidence of understanding all that is said, and with her own voice answers questions addressed by the audience through Mrs. Macy. To see these two women and to try to imagine what each means to the other makes one realize that he is in the presence of one of the finest friendships that ever could exist. It also intensifies the idea expressed in "The Story of My Life" that what we think of as Helen Keller is also in no small part, Anne Sullivan Macy. Helen Keller in vaudeville is worth seeing. She has a message and "The story of My Life" appeared in serial form as she puts it over. And seeing her and hearing her adds a new charm to the printed page of her book, identifying with the sound of her voice a voice which from lack of the auditory element in voice-control runs up and down the scale like that of an adolescent boy—such vivid words as "But during the first nineteen months of my life I had caught glimpses of broad green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out. If we have once seen, 'the day is ours, and what the day has shown.' R. S. THERE IS HOPE! "It beats the Deuce," the old Sport said, "The stunts these doctors do to aid! The other day a tale I read, That makes me feel no more afraid You know we all descended from Some monkey ancestry, that Tom "Hence man has always been too prone Until advancing age has brought "But now, some scientific guy He grafted monkey glands on man, "No monkeys in the Zoos are left! They're looking for another source Of glands. Some urge a bull or horse. H. ELLIOTT BATES, M. D. |