Library · Americas
The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees
James Mooney. Washington, 1891.
What it is
Mooney's study of Cherokee medicine, published in the Bureau of Ethnology's Seventh Annual Report. The Library transcribes only his list of twenty medicinal plants, which gives each plant's Cherokee name and use beside what the U.S. Dispensatory said of it. The formulas themselves are sacred and are not transcribed.
Whose knowledge it records
The knowledge of Eastern Cherokee doctors in North Carolina, among them Ayunini (Swimmer), written down by an ethnologist in the years before 1891. Mooney often judges their medicine against that of his own day; passages that belittle the people are left out.