BEFORE the family doctors came, frontiersmen sawed off legs with handsaws, tied up arteries with horsetail hair, cauterized them with branding irons. Before homemade surgery with steel tools was practiced, Mexican _curanderas_ (herb women) supplied _remedios_, and they still know the medicinal properties of every weed and bush. Herb stores in San Antonio, Brownsville, and El Paso do a thriving business. Behind the _curanderas_ were the medicine men of the tribes. Not all their lore was superstition, as any one who reads the delectable autobiography of Gideon Lincecum, published by the Mississippi Historical Society in 1904, will agree. Lincecum, learned in botany, a sharply-edged individual who later moved to Texas, went out to live with a Choctaw medicine man and wrote down all his lore about the virtues of native plants. The treatise has never been printed. The extraordinary life of Lincecum has, however, been interestingly delineated in Samuel Wood Geiser's _Naturalists of the Frontier_, Southern Methodist University Press, 1937, 1948, and in Pat Ireland Nixon's _The Medical Story of Early Texas_, listed below. No historical novelist could ask for a richer theme than Gideon Lincecum or Edmund Montgomery, the subject of I. K. Stephens' biography listed below. BUSH, I. J. _Gringo Doctor_, Caldwell, Idaho, 1939. OP. Dr. Bush represented frontier medicine and surgery on both sides of the Rio Grande. Living at El Paso, he was for a time with the Maderistas in the revolution against Diaz. COE, URLING C. _Frontier Doctor_, New York, 1939. OP. Not of the Southwest but representing other frontier doctors. Lusty autobiography full of characters and anecdotes. DODSON, RUTH. "Don Pedrito Jaramillo: The Curandero of Los Olmos," in _The Healer of Los Olmos and Other Mexican Lore_ (Publication of the Texas Folklore Society XXIV), edited by Wilson M. Hudson, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1951. Don Pedrito was no more of a fraud than many an accredited psychiatrist, and he was the opposite of offensive. NIXON, PAT IRELAND. _A Century of Medicine in San Antonio_, published by the author, San Antonio, 1936. Rich in information, diverting in anecdote, and tonic in philosophy. Bibliography. _The Medical Story of Early Texas, 1528-1835_ [San Antonio], 1946. Lightness of life with scholarly thoroughness; many character sketches. RED, MRS. GEORGE P. _The Medicine Man in Texas_, Houston, 1930. Biographical. OP.