The Dancing Healers: A Doctor's Journey of Healing With Native Americans - Hardcover

Carl A. Hammerschlag

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0062503944 ISBN 13: 9780062503947

Publisher: Harper and Row, 1988

Synopsis

This fascinating account of a Yale-trained psychiatrist's twenty-year experience with Native American healing interweaves autobiography with stories of the Native Americans who challenged his medical school assumptions about their methods.

While working as a family physicans in a Native American hospital in the Southwest, Carl Hammerschlag was introduced to a patient named Santiago, a Pueblo priest and clan chief, who asked him where he had learned how to heal. Hammerschlag responded almost by rote, rattling off his medical education, intership, and certification.

The old man replied,"Do you know how to dance?"

To humor Santiago, Hammerschlag shuffled his feet at the priest's bedside. Despite his condition, Santiago got up and demonstrated the proper steps. "You must be able to dance if you are to heal people,"he admonished the young doctor."I can teach you my steps, but you will have to hear your own music."

Hammerschlag synthesizes his Jewish heritage with his experience with Native Americans to produce a practice open to all methods of healing. He discovers the wisdom of the Pueblo priest's question to his Western doctor, "Do you know how to dance?"

About this title

About the Author

Carl A. Hammerschlag, M.D., is a master storyteller and internationally recognized author, physician, speaker and healer. A Yale-trained psychiatrist; he has spent more than twenty years working with Native Americans. He is an expert on how to survive in rapidly changing cultures. Now one of the worlds leading proponents of Psychoneuroimmunology (mind-body spirit medicine), he is a faculty member at theUniversity of Arizona Medical School.

From Library Journal

The author spent 20 years as a physician working among Native Americans in the Southwest. He began with a conventional medical outlook but grew to regard the traditional Indian ways of ritual, healing, and dying with awe and admiration. This is a glowing personal account of his experiences, which he claims have enabled him to meld Jewish and Native American spiritual concepts and become a "dancing healer," one who is able to help others pursue the meaning and wisdom of lifeand cure their diseases. For public libraries.Judith Eannarino, George Washington Univ. Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper and Row
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0062503944
• ISBN 13: 9780062503947
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1