Henry Spelman, one of the early colonists, wrote of Jamestown and Virginia as they were in 1609 and 1610. He described the manner of visiting with the sick among the Indians. According to Spelman, the "preest" laid the sick Indian upon a mat and, sitting down beside him, placed a bowl of water and a rattle between them. Taking the water into his mouth and spraying it over the Indian, the priest then began to beat his chest and make noises with the rattle. Rising, he shook the rattle over all of his patient's body, rubbed the distressed parts with his hands, and then sprinkled water over him again. Like the colonist, the Indian tried to draw out blood or other matter from the sick or wounded person. The method often used for releasing the ill humor from a painful joint or limb must have caused considerable suffering but may have offered certain advantages in preventing fatal infection. If the affected part could bear it, the Indian thrust a smoldering pointed stick deep into the sore place and kept it there until the excess matter could drain off. Another technique for burning and opening had a small cone of slowly burning wood inserted in the distressed place, "letting it burn out upon the part, which makes a running sore effectually." Still another method for treating a wound was for the priest to gash open the wound with a small bit of flint, suck the blood and other matter from it, and finally apply to it the powder of a root. A colonist in describing the practice wrote that "they have many professed phisitions, who with their charmes and rattels, with an infernall rowt of words and actions, will seeme to sucke their inwarde griefe from their navels or their grieved places." Judging by other accounts written during the century concerning Indian medicine, the powdered root may well have been sassafras, of which there was an abundance in the Jamestown area. The priest dried the root in the embers of a fire, scraped off the outer bark, powdered it, and bound the wound after applying the powder. Not only did the native American resort to a crude form of bloodletting but he practiced sweating as well--which was also common to seventeenth-century European medical practice. In Captain John Smith's description of Virginia it was noted that when troubled with "dropsies, swellings, aches, and such like diseases" the cure was to build a stove "in the form of a dovehouse with mats, so close that a fewe coales therein covered with a pot, will make the pacient sweate extreamely." Before lighting his stove, the Indian covered his sweating place with bark so close that no air could enter. When he began to sweat profusely, the sick Indian dashed out from his heated shelter and into a nearby creek, sea, or river. An Englishman commented that after returning to his hut again he "either recover[s] or give[s] up the ghost."