Medicine: The Case of Mary Grey-Eyes

There were no jobs for migrant stoop laborers around Arizona’s Indian reservations in early August, so Robert Grey-Eyes and family were idle. True to the Navajos’ matrilinear tradition, they moved in on his mother-in-law, Ason Tso, near Many Farms, 150 miles east of the Grand Canyon. Mary Grey-Eyes, 35, a broad-faced, well-built mother of two, seemed fit despite chronic gall-bladder disease. But one Saturday afternoon, as towering Black Mountain’s shadow reached across Carson Mesa to the comfortless, slab-sided hogan, the pain in Mary’s side got worse than ever. Soon she was nauseated and feverish; then her headache became unbearable.

Following centuries-old tribal custom, the family called in a nidilniihi, a diagnostician who works by hand-trembling—but they fetched her in their own 1953 Chevrolet sedan. Diagnostician Emma Teller squatted at Mary’s bedside, dusted corn pollen on her upturned right palm, made the zigzag lightning sign with her left forefinger and crooned a ritual chant. As she passed her hand over Mary’s body, it began to tremble. From its motion (ni’dilniih) Emma concluded that Mary had somehow offended the Wind Spirits. Her prescription: a chishiji, a two-day sing led by a medicine man.

First Aid, Cold Bath. But Mary Grey-Eyes was not to be sung over. Next day she was worse, and the family decided there might be stronger medicine more promptly available five miles away at the Navajo-Cornell Field Health Research Project’s clinic. For first aid they performed a hóchxó’iji to ward off evil. This included a cold bath in the open air, after which the patient understandably felt worse. Then they took her to the clinic.

From Mary’s 104° fever and other signs, Field Physician Garfield Fred Burkhardt suspected meningitis, probably tuberculous—a disease that was invariably fatal until twelve years ago. He plunged a needle into her back and tapped the spinal fluid. Its high cell content buttressed his fears. While Navajo Nelson Bennett worked the field radio to alert the Navajo medical center at Fort Defiance for an emergency admission, Dr. Burkhardt gave Mary Grey-Eyes a massive penicillin injection. This would combat the infection if pneumococci, rather than tubercle bacilli, were the cause.

There was a third and worse possibility: meningococci, which could kill Mary within an hour or two. Dr. Burkhardt dared not delay either treatment or hospitalization. He ordered one of the clinic’s two radio-equipped sedans rigged with an infusion bottle hung from the coat hook and bundled Mary into the car. A Navajo staff member drove the 90 miles (much of it over spring-breaking dirt roads) to Fort Defiance, while Burkhardt squatted by the patient, gave her a continuous intravenous infusion of sulfadiazine.

Three Threats. At the U.S. Public Health Service Indian Hospital and Sanatorium, Mary Grey-Eyes became the patient of Dr. Roger Des Prez, another Cornell University physician on special reservation duty. He found her almost comatose, kept up Burkhardt’s precautionary measures, and started additional injections of isoniazid and streptomycin to attack the suspected tuberculous infection. White man’s medicine was thus answering all three threats. But Mary Grey-Eyes kept getting worse. Her blood pressure fell, and her pulse raced. Dr. Des Prez decided to add yet another modern miracle drug, hydrocortisone. Within four hours Mary Grey-Eyes opened her big brown eyes, was clear-headed enough to know that she was in the hospital. Within 24 hours she was fully conscious, began a steady recovery from her meningitis (later confirmed as tuberculous by laboratory tests done in New York City). To guard against relapse, husband Robert took her clothes home from the sanatorium, hired a medicine man to conduct a 36-hour hózhóngji over them. This was far safer than the Indians’ former habit of taking the patient home too soon, and probably just as effective.

Mary has done so well (though she will have to stay in the sanatorium for months until her infected spinal fluid is cleared completely) that recently, when her gall bladder kicked up again, her doctors decided to operate. Last week, in the Indian Hospital’s small but modern operating room, Surgeon Henry C. Savage found one large gallstone and several smaller ones, dropped them into a beaker and gave them to delighted husband Robert Grey-Eyes, who had watched the operation from a balcony. They may figure in aiother hózhóngji soon. This week Mary Grey-Eyes was walking around, chatting with her husband and Navajo nurses, doing as well as though she had never been brushed by the wings of death.

Two-Way Help. The treatment of Mary Grey-Eyes was an unusually dramatic but otherwise typical activity of a precedent-breaking project, a cooperative effort of Cornell University, the Federal Government (through PHS), private foundations, and the Navajo people themselves. All give financial support to the Field Health Research Project. Just as Eastern financiers, philanthropists and Government functionaries meet in paneled board rooms and vote money to help “the poor Indian,” so does the Navajo Tribal Council, governing body of a newly prosperous Navajo nation (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) vote funds to help the white man. It has put up a total of $80,000 in the last seven years for the clinic’s expansion and operating costs.

Set forlornly in the middle of a barren valley between spectacular mountains, the clinic at Many Farms is housed in a single-story, barracks-type building, while the 18 staff members (six white, twelve Navajos) live in trailers with various types of additions, and in old Santa Fe railroad boxcars. Under the direction of Manhattan-based Dr. Kurt W. Deuschle of Cornell’s Department of Public Health, the project’s aim is not only day-by-day treatment of ailing Navajos. Of greater long-range importance is a study in depth of the tribe’s health needs (from a sample area of 800 sq. mi., with a population of 2,400), and how its traditional attitudes toward health can be most effectively merged with white men’s methods.

Mind & Body. Guided by staff anthropologists, the clinic accepts native Navajo medicine and medicine men—in sharp contrast with most oldtime medical missionaries, who forbade the Navajos to practice their rituals. Fortunately, the Navajos have some sound ideas about health. Health, they hold, consists in being in harmony with all one’s surroundings—human, animal, and the spirits of nature. They recognize no dichotomy between mind and body; so all their medicine is, in a sense, psychosomatic.

When Cornell physicians believe that they have cured the physical side of a Navajo’s ills, and that his remaining problems are emotional, they agree that he may find help among his own people. In effect, they are referring him to a medicine man. And as mutual understanding improves, they are delighted to find that a nidilniihi, like other native diagnosticians, is more likely to refer patients direct to the clinic, bypassing the chishiji and similar sings. The medicine men, more and more, are admitting themselves to PHS hospitals to get white man’s magic for illnesses which, they recognize, they cannot cure themselves. The Many Farms clinic itself has a dual tie with the divinities of healing: its Hippocratic directors were careful, when it was dedicated 2½ years ago, to have two Navajo medicine men conduct elaborate good-omen rituals. It looks as though the magic of both races has been effective.