Medicine: A Cure for Curanderismo

A boy playing in the yard fell and broke his arm; his mother rushed him not to a doctor but to a kuesero, a bonesetter with no formal training. A wife, seeing her tuberculous husband racked by coughing and wasting away, called in a curandero (healer), who prescribed donkey milk. A wife who had fallen into a deep, psychotic depression was made to lie on a dirt floor while the curandero outlined her body with a knife; then she drank the mud made with dirt collected from the knife. A child with bone cancer was sentenced to early death because his parents refused a doctor’s recommendation for amputation, relied instead on native herbs.

These cases occurred not in some faraway, half-illiterate country but in Texas, home of most of the U.S.’s 2,000,000 or more citizens of Mexican origin. Although some families have had U.S. citizenship since Texas’ annexation in 1845, most of these, like the Juan-come-latelys, have clung to their ancestral language, customs —and faith in curanderismo. It flourishes throughout the Rio Grande Valley.

Who’s the Quack? In Hidalgo, second county upriver from the Gulf, health authorities got state help for a four-year study by anthropologists and sociologists. Last week, in Hidalgo’s county seat of Edinburg, the researchers gave their prescription for dealing with curanderismo: “Don’t fight it—join it.” To the incredulous M.D.s who heard the report, Study Director William Madsen, a University of Texas anthropologist, explained: Mexican-Americans still reject the germ theory of disease and infection; to them, a raw egg has more healing power than an antibiotic, and a hospital is a place to go to die. It is useless for M.D.s to assail this quackery. To the Mexican-American, the gringo doctor is the quack. “Just as the Anglo* goes to the folk curist only in the last stages of cancer when everything else has failed, the Latin American goes to the physician only after all else has failed,” said Madsen. “He thinks as much of penicillin as we do of bat wings.”

Because so many Mexican-Americans are migratory farm workers, and get as far as the Canadian borders in summer, some Northerners have feared that their fruits and vegetables might carry diseases. The study found no evidence of this. Typhoid, the most communicable of such diseases, is virtually unknown. But tuberculosis is rampant, and migratory workers often have relapses while far afield. When they get back home, they appeal to one of the more than 3,000 curanderos.

Supernatural Success. The “weak chest,” as the victim calls it, may be first considered a natural disease, and the curandero treats it with herbs and donkey milk. Since it does not respond, it is then rediagnosed as a supernatural disease, for treatment by a brujo, or witch doctor.

When he fails, death is God’s will. Mental illness is always rated as supernatural, and the “hex” must be taken off by prayer or some magic ritual. But because the brujos understand the Mexican-American psychology, they score higher than doctors in curing mental illness.

To sell modern medicine to the 2,000,000 holdouts, said Madsen, physicians will have to adopt some of the curanderos’ tricks. When they give vaccines to ward off an epidemic, they can say that they are injecting holy water. As for TB: “If the doctors just added donkey milk to the regular treatment, it might work out a lot better.”

Madsen and his study team recommended that Mexican-Americans be charged a token payment for each treatment, and get a receipt for it. because they will refuse free treatment as a despised form of charity. Finally, the curanderos should be enlisted as health aides. They can be given short courses to qualify as practical nurses, suggested Madsen. and allowed to wear uniforms or badges, and to dispense simple medicines. They should serve as go-betweens for doctors and nurses and Mexican-American patients. Then, at last, they will bring their patients to clinics and hospitals, where they can get modern scientific treatment—by whatever name.

* The Southwest U.S. catchall term for white, English-speaking Americans of Northern European descent.