on reservations located on unfamiliar land, while others fled in search of land where they might be left undisturbed. Even tribes that sought to adopt "civilized" ways were swept away. A notorious example of this was the removal of the Cherokee nation to Oklahoma during the winter of 1838-39. This journey, in which many members of the tribe perished, became known as "The Trail of Tears." But all the Indian nations were victimized. Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole from the South and northern tribes such as the Ottawa, Huron, and Miami were all dislocated. These refugees eventually met on the western side of the Mississippi, land of the proud Plains Indians. The American medical establishment continued to look to Europe for guidance in understanding the human body, but individual Americans did provide notable contributions. Philip Syng Physick is generally acknowledged as the man who established surgery as a specialty in America, while Daniel Drake was a tremendously influential educator. In addition, the author Oliver Wendell Holmes was the first to recognize that puerperal (childbed) fever was a contagious malady. Both European and American physicians of the early nineteenth century supported general regimens of "diet, exercise, rest, baths and massage, bloodletting, scarification, cupping, blistering, sweating, emetics, purges, enemas, and fumigations," according to Medicine: An Illustrated History. "There were multitudes of plant and mineral drugs available, but only a few rested on sound physiological or even empiric foundations." The threat of diseases such as yellow fever (which killed thirteen thousand people in the Mississippi Valley in 1843), cholera, and smallpox continued to terrorize the American people, but these maladies proved even more deadly to Native Americans who came into contact with whites. Smallpox epidemics decimated entire tribes of Indians, whose immune systems were particularly vulnerable to such unfami...
