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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.