Abstract
IN the July number of the Annals of the Natal Government Museum, Father A. T. Bryant, a competent observer of native life and author of a valuable dictionary of the tribal language, has for the first time collected materials for the study of Zulu materia medica and the methods of the local medicine-man. He records some 240 Zulu plants used in medicine, giving what the people believe to be their properties and the modes in which they are administered to the patient. Here, as among other savage races, the medicine-man was a personage originally distinct from the diviner or so-called witch-doctor; but their functions tend occasionally to overlap, the medicine-man dealing largely in magic and charms, while the witch-doctor makes himself familiar with curative herbs, though his real business is to indicate or “smell out” the agency which is supposed to have caused the illness.
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Materia Medica Among The Zulus . Nature 81, 298–299 (1909). https://doi.org/10.1038/081298b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/081298b0