Before homemade surgery
with steel tools was practiced, Mexican _curanderas_ (herb
women) supplied _remedios_, and they still know the medicinal
properties of every weed and bush. Herb stores in San Antonio,
Brownsville, and El Paso do a thriving business. Behind the
_curanderas_ were the medicine men of the tribes. Not all
their lore was superstition, as any one who reads the
delectable autobiography of Gideon Lincecum, published by the
Mississippi Historical Society in 1904, will agree. Lincecum,
learned in botany, a sharply-edged individual who later moved
to Texas, went out to live with a Choctaw medicine man and
wrote down all his lore about the virtues of native plants.
The treatise has never been printed.
The extraordinary life of Lincecum has, however, been
interestingly delineated in Samuel Wood Geiser's _Naturalists
of the Frontier_, Southern Methodist University Press, 1937,
1948, and in Pat Ireland Nixon's _The Medical Story of Early
Texas_, listed below. No historical novelist could ask for a
richer theme than Gideon Lincecum or Edmund Montgomery, the
subject of I. K. Stephens' biography listed below.
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