Medicine and Morality in Haiti
The Contest for Healing Power

A study of how medicine and morality in rural Haiti are shaped both by local religious traditions and by biomedical and folk medical practices.

Paul Brodwin (Author)

9780521575430, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 13 September 1996

260 pages, 17 b/w illus. 1 map
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.395 kg

Morality and medicine are inextricably intertwined in rural Haiti, and both are shaped by the different local religious traditions, Christian and Vodoun, as well as by biomedical and folk medical practices. When people fall ill, they seek treatment not only from Western doctors but also from herbalists, religious healers and midwives. Dr Brodwin examines the situational logic, the pragmatic decisions, that guide people in making choices when they are faced with illness. He also explains the moral issues that arise in a society where suffering is associated with guilt, but where different, sometimes conflicting, ethical systems coexist. Moreover, he shows how in the crisis of illness people rework religious identities and are forced to address fundamental social and political problems.

Part I. History and Ethnography of Biomedicine: 2. Metropolitan medicine and strategies of rule
3. Biomedicine in Jeanty
4. Medicalization and illness experience: two case studies
Part II. The Moral Discourse of Medical Pluralism: 5. The Catholic practice of healing
6. Houngan and the limits to Catholic morality
7. Religious healing and the fragmentation of rural life
8. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]