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Physician, Heal Thyself
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16918 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1990 |
1,690 Words |
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Beryl Lieff Benderly
Beryl Lieff Benderly is the author of Dancing Without Music:
Deafness in America, Thinking About Abortion, and The Myth of
Two Minds: What Gender Means and Doesn't Mean, which won
honorable mention in the 1988 National Psychology awards for
Excellence in the Media. |
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
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