Where intemperance produces no diseases, there will be no physicians by profession; yet where there is sufferance, there will always be attempts to relieve; and where the cause of the mischief and the remedy are alike unknown, these will naturally be directed by superstition: thus it happens, that in this country, and in all others which are not further injured by luxury, or improved by knowledge, the management of the sick falls to the lot of the priest. The method of cure that is practised by the priests of Otaheite, consists chiefly of prayers and ceremonies. When he visits his patient he repeats certain sentences, which appear to be set forms contrived for the occasion, and at the same time plats the leaves of the cocoa-nut into different figures very neatly; some of these he fastens to the fingers and toes of the sick, and often leaves behind him a few branches of the _thespecia populnea_, which they call _E’midho_: these ceremonies are repeated till the patient recovers or dies. If he recovers, they say the remedies cured him; if he dies, they say the disease was incurable; in which perhaps they do not much differ from the custom of other countries. If we had judged of their skill in surgery from the dreadful scars which we sometimes saw, we should have supposed it to be much superior to the art, not only of their physicians, but of ours. We saw one man whose face was almost entirely destroyed, his nose, including the bone, was perfectly flat, and one cheek and one eye were so beaten in, that the hollow would almost receive a man’s fist, yet no ulcer remained; and our companion, Tupia, had been pierced quite through his body by a spear, headed with the bone of the sting-ray, the weapon having entered his back, and come out just under his breast; but except in reducing dislocations and fractures, the best surgeon can contribute very little to the cure of a wound; the blood itself is the best vulnerary balsam, and when the juices of the body are pure, and the patient is temperate, nothing more is necessary as an aid to nature in the cure of the worst wound, than the keeping it clean.