Jasper County Democrat, Volume 10, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 July 1907 — The “Blackfellow” Doctors. [ARTICLE]

The “Blackfellow” Doctors.

Dr. A. W. Howitt in his “Native Tribes of Southeast Australia” gives an Interesting account of those medicine men called the “blackfellow doctors.” The blackfellow relies upon the supernatural for his effects, but he is believed to be wholly sincere, as he lives among a people not yet civilized to the point of understanding a “nature fakir." Dr. Howitt says of him: “He is everywhere believed to have received his dreaded power from some supernatural source or being, or from the spirits of ancestors. This power enables him to inject diseases, as it were, into people at a distance, as well as to cure disease by striking at its secret originator, who is usually a rival medicine man in a neighboring tribe. He can also preserve people from disease. He works with charms, and Individual medicine men or groups of them possess charms peculiar to themselves. In all cases the blackfellow doctor is credited with being able to see men in their Incorporeal state, either temporarily as a wraith or permauently separated from their body as a ghost, which is invisible to other eyes. He can ascend to ghostland beyond the sky or can transport himself or be transported by the ghosts from one spot of earth to another at will, much after the manner of the Buddhist Arhat He can, it is also thought assume animal farms ar control the elements.”