According to one early eighteenth-century history of Virginia, the Indian in choosing raw materials for drugs preferred roots and barks of trees to the leaves of plants or trees. If the drug were to be taken internally it was mixed with water; when juices were to be applied externally they were left natural unless water was necessary for moistening. Whatever the drug and however utilized, the Indian called it _wisoccan_ or _wighsacan_, for this term was not a specific herb, as some of the earlier settlers thought, but a general term.
Besides sassafras, medicinal roots and barks, the Indian believed in beneficial effects of a kind of clay called _wapeig_. The clay, in the opinion of the Indians, cured sores and wounds; an English settler marvelled to find in use "a strange kind of earth, the vertue whereof I know not; but the Indians eate it for physicke, alleaging that it cureth the sicknesse and paine of the belly." Insomuch as the Indian priest preferred to keep his professional secrets, the colonist was unlikely ever to learn the "vertue" of the clay.
If the Indian medicine man had not believed that his gods would be displeased--or his prestige lowered--by revealing the nature of the _wisoccan_ he prescribed, it would have been possible for the early Virginians to have drawn upon the Indian knowledge of, and experience with, the simples and therapies of the New World. (Perhaps the "vertues" of the clay would have cured the "paines" of the Jamestown bellies.) As it was, the settlers make little mention of a reliance upon the Indians for medical assistance.
Disease and The Critical Years At Jamestown
In 1606 King James of England granted a charter to Sir Thomas Gates and others authorizing settlements in the New World. In 1609 this charter was revised and enlarged, granting the privileges to a joint-stock company. Among the merchants, knights, and gentlemen holding shares in the company and among those particularly interested in the more southerly areas of North America, including Virginia, were a number of physicians. The instructions given to the first settlers reflect the general concern of the London Company for the health of the colony and perhaps the particular interest of the physicians. One of the physicians, John Woodall, took especial care to urge that cattle be sent to provide the settlers with the milk he considered essential to their health.