MEDICINE WOMEN, CURANDERAS, AND WOMEN DOCTORS
Bobette Perrone, Henrietta Stockel, and Victoria Krueger
University of Oklahoma Press, 1989
252 pp., $18.95
"Magicians can do more by means of faith than physicians by the truth," the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno observed in 1585. Ever since, investigators have tried to discover exactly what it is that healers outside the scientific tradition actually do to achieve their mysterious but indisputable cures. Shamans, medicine people, and spiritual healers clearly marshal forces beyond the ken and interest of mainstream medicine.
This book's authors, all residents of Santa Fe, New Mexico, share Bruno's fascination but reject his principal assumption. School-certified medicos do not monopolize "the truth," they insist, nor is there only a single truth to be discovered. As evidence they offer their neighbors, the Native Americans and Hispanics who have inhabited the Southwest far a longer than Anglos and whose systems of care are quite foreign to "AMA medicine." "The first premise of this book," announces its opening paragraph, "is that each of the different cultural approaches to healing presented in this volume has something to contribute to the goal of wellness."
Approaches to healing
In the grab bag of chapters that follows, they take us on expeditions to the far reaches of several healing systems, each built on its own model of what makes patients sick and how curers make them well. Mainstream medicine rests on scientific objectivity. Curanderismo harnesses the power of God, Jesus, and the Catholic saints. Indian healing rituals restore human beings to harmony with the forces of nature.
These are quite separate intellectual and spiritual worlds. The best way into them, the authors believe, is through the lives of actual practitioners. By knowing how these people trained, what they do, and what they think they're doing, we can begin to grasp the powers at their disposal. Over a period of years the authors gathered accounts from ten different women healers. (A second, crosscutting priority of the book demonstrates a special, female talent for healing.)
Simply finding three Hispanic and three Native American practitioners amenable to extensive interviews on their work represents a considerable undertaking. The indigenous people of the Southwest have endured generations of scholarly snoops, and many refuse to cooperate in exposing anymore of their sacred secrets for the edification of Anglo readers. The authors promised to "maintain the communal and contextual spirit of the knowledge," which in practice translated into relinquishing to informants a high degree of control over what was finally printed.
The Native American profiles each represent a different culture. Annie Kahn is a traditional Navaho medicine woman, Tu Moonwalker an Apache weaver and healer who also holds three university degrees, including one in anthropology. Dhyani Ywahoo, a keeper of Cherokee priestly knowledge and a former New York University philosophy lecturer, runs the Sun-ray Meditation Society in Vermont. How well these women typify
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