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Medicine man   /mˈɛdəsən mæn/   Listen
noun
Medicine  n.  
1.
The science which relates to the prevention, cure, or alleviation of disease.
2.
Any substance administered in the treatment of disease; a remedial agent; a medication; a drug; a pharmaceutical; a medicament; a remedy; physic. "By medicine, life may be prolonged."
3.
A philter or love potion. (Obs.)
4.
A physician. (Obs.)
5.
(a)
Among the North American Indians, any object supposed to give control over natural or magical forces, to act as a protective charm, or to cause healing; also, magical power itself; the potency which a charm, token, or rite is supposed to exert. "The North American Indian boy usually took as his medicine the first animal of which he dreamed during the long and solitary fast that he observed at puberty."
(b)
Hence, a similar object or agency among other savages.
6.
Short for Medicine man.
7.
Intoxicating liquor; drink. (Slang)
Medicine bag, a charm; so called among the North American Indians, or in works relating to them.
Medicine man (among the North American Indians), a person who professes to cure sickness, drive away evil spirits, and regulate the weather by the arts of magic; a shaman.
Medicine seal, a small gem or paste engraved with reversed characters, to serve as a seal. Such seals were used by Roman physicians to stamp the names of their medicines.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Medicine man" Quotes from Famous Books



... 6th. After being kept outside the doctor's bureau from 9 till 12.30, the great man, the controller of fates, the donor of tickets, the Maitland medicine man, has seen me, and, whatever he has done, has not ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross

... comes to his death bed, seventy or eighty years from now, and the medicine man tells him but little more breath is left in his body, what then do ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... interwoven with many of the cases mentioned above, if the question was raised and the investigation made. In the Caroline archipelago fishing is combined with various rites and religious notions. The chief medicine man owes the authority of his position, not to his knowledge of the art of fishing, but to his knowledge of the formulae of incantation and exorcism employed in fishing. There must be abstinence from the sex relation before a fishing expedition. The men start in silence. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... a few miles north of Plymouth. These new settlers were not so honest as those that had settled at Plymouth. They stole from the Indians and otherwise injured them, and caused them to plot against all the whites in the country. But before their plans were carried out Massasoit was taken sick. The medicine man was ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney

... Christmas time game is usually dormant, still living on the stores of the fall and not yet driven afield by spring hunger. In camp was no food. The hunters halted the march, and came in Christmas Eve of 1633 with not so much as a pound of flesh for nearly fifty people. From the first the Indian medicine man had heaped ridicule on the white priest, and Pierre had refused to interpret as much as a single prayer; but now the whole camp was starving. Pierre happened to tell the other Indians that Christmas was the day on which the white man's God had come to earth. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... take her to his home hampered by a bevy of young children. Fathers guilty of incestuous practices would therefore be unable to dispose of their daughters to advantage, and thus a prejudice in favor of domestic purity would gradually arise which a shrewd medicine man would some day raise to the rank of a ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... absence of his father at Monterey, nodded sagely several times, and then held a short conference in Spanish with the interpreter. The priest turned to the Russians with a smile as diplomatic as that which Rezanov had drilled upon the ugly ingenuous countenance of his medicine man. ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... the physician had failed to benefit me, a traveling medicine man came to our community, set up his tent, and stayed for a week. Of course, like all traveling medicine men, his remedies were cure-alls. One night in making his talk before the crowd, he mentioned the fact that his wonderful concoction, taken with the pamphlet ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue

... you Haeckelites, I may reason like a medicine man, but, pray, how do you reason? You have nothing to stand on, you unscientific dogmatists with your positive science which you are always lugging about into places it has no right to be. Long before the school of materialistic monism ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... The medicine man addresses his remedies first to the misery, with the desire to relax the nerves and overcome pain, and obtains this result through some class of opiates. After a short rest he addresses his attention to the motor action of the heart, with the view of giving arteries greater power to force ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still



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