One could easily over-emphasize the novelty of such a procedure, considering the widespread use of peyote in doctoring, yet even the Caddo, who do not doctor with peyote, often have four meetings to pray for the recovery of the sick person; certainly cures by peyote do not rest entirely on the “technological” procedure of the patient’s eating and drinking peyote, but others present “help” by eating in the name of the sufferer and praying. This is not at all unlike the presence of relatives and others in the sweat bath praying for the patient’s recovery; the various uses of sage, the fire pits in some altars, and the ritual necessity for a fire even on the hottest summer nights further suggest sweat bath parallels.[125] Peyote is a panacea in doctoring. A Cheyenne woman was cured of a cancer of the liver which had been pronounced hopeless at a White hospital. Such invidious distinctions between White and peyote doctoring are common; for the former represents merely human skill, and is not the unmodified herb the direct creation of God? Belo Kozad, himself a well-known Kiowa peyote doctor, spoke as follows: When my sick wife was in there I chewed peyote for her. Her skin got like wood bark—the hair come out. The doctors couldn’t make it. We give it up, can’t do anything. [It was] diabetes, and we shoot him every time she eats. That spoils the people; they lose the mind and the skin gets bad. That morphine for Howard [Sankadote, who was ill the night of the meeting and could not be present] make him talk funny. It just ruin the people in the mind. _Come_ to peyote! God knows more than any people! Perhaps Belo had every “pragmatic” right to talk thus: had he not himself cured a boy’s hemorrhage by eating one hundred green peyotes for him? Peyote indeed is a famous cure for tuberculosis and respiratory diseases. John Bearskin (Winnebago) knew of two cures by “Sister Etta” in meetings: one a woman with goitre, the other a boy who had previously been dumb.[126] Pneumonia also readily yields to peyote, producing beneficial perspiration when thirty buttons are drunk over a period of hours in two quarts of water. The writer has seen doctoring with peyote for a crushed thigh, tuberculosis, and malnutrition (?) in a two-year-old child; this last cried fretfully in the early part of the meeting, but was fed “tea” until it was blue and quiet in strychnine tetanus by morning. The wife of our Quapaw host had also been “operated on in church.”