Reading Notes: Tejas Legends, Reading B

 How Sickness Entered the World

This was a really cool story and I really enjoyed it as someone who wants to go into medicine it is really interesting to see some of the early ideas about health and where sickness comes from. I also like that it was out of fear and people were punished for doing something that they did not know that they could not do. A snake is a venomous creature and when it got there it did something that would typically be known for attacking another perception of the story is one of the men could have instead been bitten and the snake could have been infected from the bite and when they got back they spread the virus or pathogen among the camp. This was a very different story for me to read. While I have read stories in this class this one I am able to look at from a different perspective. I enjoyed reading this story and I like how it was the human's fault and then it was selfishness and fear that got the sickness to be spread. If I were to write this story in a more modern way I think that I would still try to make the snake the one who spread the disease and instead it attacked because the wrong person showed up and instead he was killed out of self-defense and when they went back the medicine man was already dead and so they went back to the snake and brought it back to burn but when they burned the snake a bunch of spores went in the air infecting a lot of people. That way it is more realistic but also keeping true to the source material. I am not sure how I will incorporate the spirits but I will. 

Snake

Bibliography

When the Storm God Rides: Tejas and Other Indian Legends retold by Florence Stratton and illustrated by Berniece Burrough (1936).