The Medicine Man is the second of four prominent sculptures of indigenous people on horseback known as The Epic of the Indian, which also includes A Signal of Peace (1890), Protest of the Sioux (1904), and Appeal to the Great Spirit (1908).

[4] At the time Dallin began working on his first Native American monument, A Signal of Peace, in 1889 in Paris, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was based out of Neuilly, France for seven months.

John C. Ewers, an ethnologist who specialized in the American Plains Indians, asserts that Dallin executed so many works on speculation because he felt "impelled to do so," and found "little difficulty in finding a market for them.

This reopening of the past to me would never have been possible, had not your artist risen above the distorting influence of the prejudice one race is apt to feel toward another and been gifted with the imagination to discern the truth which underlies a strange exterior.

The figure is wearing a horned feathered war bonnet, a headdress with spiritual significance, typically worn by Plains Indians for ceremonial purposes.

It has been variously viewed as a stand-alone sculpture; as a part of a chronological series by Dallin; and in the context of the artist's relationship with the Native American community.

He found The Medicine Man to be "one of the most notable and significant products of American sculpture," and that Dallin's "mounted Indians are among the most interesting public monuments in this country.

[11] In the early twentieth century, these four sculptures were interpreted chronologically to represent "the fate" of Native Americans from "the time of the entrance of the white man to the dying of the Indian race.

"[5] Burns bases this interpretation on Dallin's record of challenging of US imperialism, his "unease with the discourse of assimilation," and his use of "his words and his art to criticize US treatment of Native communities during western expansion.

"[5] Burns acknowledges that Dallin was aware of the "interpretations of his work that framed it in terms of vanishing race mythology," and he did not "overtly object" to this view, likely because "such criticism enhanced the marketability of his projects among white patrons.

Alvan F. Sanborn, a journalist, identified The Medicine Man's role in this chronological series as a figure that "foresees the approaching ruin and ultimate extinction of his people and is striving, with little more chance of success than Cassandra of Troy, to ward them against impending catastrophe.

Similarly, in a review of the four sculptures that make up Dallin's series, E. Wilbur Pomeroy interprets The Medicine Man as the statue that "sounds the note of warning.

[12]Art historian Emily Burns complicates these interpretations, arguing that "whereas Signal of Peace offered the sitter agency through the act of negotiation, Medicine Man gave him a metaphorical voice" and that while the "political context has not emerged as clearly as that of Signal of Peace," The Medicine Man is "significant for its celebration of Native Spirituality and tribal leadership in the context of assimilation.

Burns emphasizes Dallin's "elision of tribal differences and invocation of standard types," which "comprised his critique of white America's treatment of Native peoples.

Furthermore, she points out that Dallin "perpetuated dominant white narratives concerning Native peoples by drawing on the common nineteenth-century sculptural practice of depicting the noble American Indian on horseback.

[5] His wife, Vittoria Colonna Murray, noted in an unpublished manuscript that Dallin "felt his mission was to prove [American Indians'] great qualities and show how America's treatment of them was a blot on the escutcheon.

"[14] Art historian William Howe Downes found that Dallin's Native American sculptures were "a direct, natural, and inevitable outgrowth of his youthful Western experiences in close contact with the red man, his admiration for their character, and his pity for their misfortunes, and not merely the deliberate intellectual objective illustration of an effective theme for statuary.