in' ob de owls, and gittin' a little fresh dirt frum de
graveyard--honey, dar am su'thin' agwinter drop."

The above is part of a conversation held with me by one of these "herb
kings" in South Carolina in 1890. Hence you can see that, like all
other evils, these voodoo doctors do not die fast; and even to-day not
a few still live.

This being with his weird stories went forth among a people who were
rocked, as it were, in the cradle of superstition, and early became
monarch of all he surveyed. He or she was known and feared throughout
the country. They claimed to be able to cure anything from consumption
to an unruly wife or husband, and furnishing charms to make love
matches and to keep the wife or husband at home was one of their
specialties.

Every patient they called on they diagnosed the trouble thus: he or
she was tricked; if pneumonia, they were tricked; if a fever, they
were tricked; or if a case of consumption, they were tricked.

Their stock of medicines, if such we must call them, generally
consisted of such things as small bags of graveyard soil, rusty nails,
needles, pins, goose grease, rabbits' feet, snake skins, and many
other such things.

I say that a little more than a generation ago this was the class of
so-called colored doctors that predominated in the South, and which
for many years was a great stumbling-block to the educated physicians
of our race, because it seemed to be understood that all colored
doctors were and must be root doctors. But, thanks to Him who holds
the destiny of races in his hands, in the flight of years and in this
electric age of progress this voodoo doctor has almost--not entirely,
but almost--passed away; while his territory is being occupied by
colored physicians whose qualifications in education, character, and
honor are equal to similar qualifications in the physicians of any
other race.

The colored physicians in the South to-day are men and women fully
equipped in education, morals, and integrity for the high calling they
have elected, as their noble work will show. In the United States
to-day there are about one thousand colored physicians, men and women,
and more than seven hundred of them are located in the Southern
States. While they represent the homeopathic and eclectic schools, yet
the regulars are largely in the majority.

The majority of the colored physicians now operating in the South took
a college course of education before taking up the study of