Note 34 — Front matter (continued 5)

M. Francard Baya delle, overseer of the Presbourg plantation at Grande Anse, tells me that the most successful treatment of snakebite consists in severe local cupping and bleeding; the immediate application of twenty to thirty leeches (when these can be obtained), and the administration of alkali as an internal medicine. He has saved several lives by these methods.

The negro panseur's method is much more elaborate and, to some extent, mysterious. He cups and bleeds, using a small couï, or half-calabash, in lieu of a glass; and then applies cataplasms of herbs,—orange-leaves, cinnamon-leaves, clove-leaves, chardon-béni, charpentier, perhaps twenty other things, all mingled together;—this poulticing being continued every day for a month. Meantime the patient is given all sorts of absurd things to drink, in tafia and sour-orange juice—such as old clay pipes ground to powder, or the head of the fer-de-lance itself, roasted dry and pounded.... The plantation negro has no faith in any other system of cure but that of the panseur;—he refuses to let the physician try to save him, and will scarcely submit to be treated even by an experienced white overseer.