Word: navajoized
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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...
...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...
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...