The stories of ten women healers form the core of this provocative journey into cultural healing methods utilized by women. In a truly grass-roots project, the authors take the reader along to listen to the voices of Native American medicine women, Southwest Hispanic curanderas, and women physicians as they describe their healing paths. This book will fascinate anyone interested in the relationship between illness and healing-medical practitioners and historians, patients, anthropologists, feminists, psychologists, psychiatrists, theologians, sociologists, folklorists, and others who seek understanding about our relationship to the forces of both illness and healing.
The stories of ten women healers form the core of this provocative journey into cultural healing methods utilized by women. In a truly grass-roots project, the authors take the reader along to listen to the voices of Native American medicine women, Southwest Hispanic curanderas, and women physicians as they describe their healing paths. This book will fascinate anyone interested in the relationship between illness and healing-medical practitioners and historians, patients, anthropologists, feminists, psychologists, psychiatrists, theologians, sociologists, folklorists, and others who seek understanding about our relationship to the forces of both illness and healing.
“An autobiographical account of how a psychiatric nurse specialist became a folk medicine healer; this also explains the origins and practice of one of the oldest forms of medicine in the New World.″—Kirkus Praise for WOMAN WHO GLOWS IN THE DARK “This is a book that we’ve been awaiting for years—one that unites the best medicine from the ancient past with the deepest needs of the contemporary heart and soul.”—Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, The Gift of Story, and Faithful Gardener “Elena Avila’s book is a combination manual, memoir, and healing chant. I’m so glad these stories and secrets – which have been known orally by our culture for ages – are finally down on paper.” —Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents “Avila shatters myths about curanderismo and reminds us that it’s just as important today as it was centuries ago.”—The Austin Chronicle “In this age of impersonal and technologic health care, Elena Avila’s book gives the reader permission to rely on what has all too often been forgotten. Her message—that healing cannot occur without the heart, instincts, wisdom, and compassion of the healer—is given with grace and simplicity.”—Barbara Dossey, R.N., M.S., HNC, FAAN, Director, Holistic Nursing Associates “Truthful, often painful, always riveting, WOMAN WHO GLOWS IN THE DARK reveals how the practices of curanderismo can heal the soul sickness not addressed by Western medicine.”—Rudolfo Anaya, author of Bless Me, Ultima “Grounded in the earth, at home in both modern and indigenous medicine, Elena Avila is a true emissary of healing, casting a brilliant glow into the dark of all medicine that denies the soul. As a human, I cherish Elena’s light. As a psychiatrist, I welcome her insight.”—Judith Orloff, M.D., author of Second Sight and The Genius of Empathy “Avila is entertaining and often humorous...Without climbing on a soapbox, [her] narrative demonstrates what’s missing from most American medical practices, and how many patients could be helped so much more than they are now.”—Kirkus Reviews
Women have always been healers -- from the priestess healers in the temples of Isis, to the hedge-witches and herbalists of medieval times, to the physicians, researchers, and alternative practitioners of today. This glorious book celebrates the history of women healers from earliest times to the present. It includes profiles of women healers from all traditions. Some are well known, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Florence Nightingale, and Mary Baker Eddy. Others deserve to be more widely recognized, such as Trotula of Salerno, who wrote gynecological and obstetrical texts in thirteenth-century Italy, and Mama Lola, a respected mambo or healing priestess in the Haitian Voodoo tradition. Text and pictures detail the many contributions of women to the healing arts, from the founding of nursing orders and the tending of soldiers, to the establishment of public health hospitals, to contemporary applications of the ancient lore of herbal medicine and therapeutic touch.
In the nineteenth century, a small but dedicated group of European and American women rose to agitate for the inclusion of women in the medical profession. It is a historic tale that we have told and retold for decades, but it is far from where the story of women as physicians and healers begins. Stretching back into deepest antiquity, we possess accounts of women who were consulted by emperors and paupers alike for their medical expertise. They were surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, university lecturers, and medical researchers in correspondence with the most learned societies of their time. And then it all came crashing down. A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research is the story of the women who participated in that early Golden Age, and of a medical establishment closing ranks against them so effectively that, by the early Victorian era, they not only were barred from practicing medicine, but from so much as stepping into a classroom where medical topics were being discussed. It is the story of that intrepid band of reformers and pioneers who built back the women's medical profession from the ashes and constructed a thriving new community of researchers and practitioners who within a century had retaken not only the ground that had been lost, but boldly advanced to levels of fame and achievement unimaginable to any previous era. Told through in-depth accounts of the lives of the pioneers and practitioners who built and rebuilt the women's medical movement, this title dives into the lives of not only legendary figures like Florence Nightingale, Gertrude Elion, Rosalyn Yalow, and Elizabeth Blackwell, but visits women the world over whose medical contributions broke down doors and advanced the cause of women's and world health, like the revolutionary medieval physician Trota of Salerno, the pioneering eighteenth century midwife and businesswoman Madame du Coudray, the microbiological research trailblazer Mary Putnam Jacobi, and the HIV researcher and world epidemic response coordinator Francoise Barre-Sinoussi. With over 140 stories spanning three millennia of global medicine, this book shines a light on the unknown heroes, towering discoveries, tragic missteps, and profound struggles that have accompanied the Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of the women's medical profession.
This book is an edited collection of essays by fourteen multicultural women (including a few Anglo women) who are doing work that crosses the boundaries of ecological and social healing. The women are prominent academics, writers and leaders spanning Native American, Indigenous, Asian, African, Latina, Jewish and Multiracial backgrounds. The contributors express a myriad of ways that the relationship between the ecological and social have brought new understanding to their experiences and work in the world. Moreover by working with these edges of awareness, they are identifying new forms of teaching, leading, healing and positive change. Ecological and Social Healing is rooted in these ideas and speaks to an "edge awareness or consciousness." In essence this speaks to the power of integrating multiple and often conflicting views and the transformations that result. As women working across the boundaries of the ecological and social, we have powerful experiences that are creating new forms of healing. This book is rooted in academic theory as well as personal and professional experience, and highlights emerging models and insights. It will appeal to those working, teaching and learning in the fields of social justice, environmental issues, women's studies, spirituality, transformative/environmental/sustainability leadership, and interdisciplinary/intersectionality studies.
Organised chronologically and then by topic, this volume covers studies of women and health in the colonial and revolutionary periods through the Civil War. The remainder of the book focuses on the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Alphabetical articles on major events, documents, persons, social movements, and political and social concepts connected with the history of women in America.
Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo were curanderos—faith healers—who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, worked outside the realm of "professional medicine," seemingly beyond the reach of the church, state, or certified health practitioners whose profession was still in its infancy. Urrea healed Mexicans, Indigenous people, and Anglos in northwestern Mexico and cities throughout the US Southwest, while Jaramillo conducted his healing practice in the South Texas Rio Grande Valley, healing Tejanos, Mexicans, and Indigenous people there. Jennifer Koshatka Seman takes us inside the intimate worlds of both "living saints," demonstrating how their effective healing—curanderismo—made them part of the larger turn-of-the century worlds they lived in as they attracted thousands of followers, validated folk practices, and contributed to a modernizing world along the US-Mexico border. While she healed, Urrea spoke of a Mexico in which one did not have to obey unjust laws or confess one's sins to Catholic priests. Jaramillo restored and fed drought-stricken Tejanos when the state and modern medicine could not meet their needs. Then, in 1890, Urrea was expelled from Mexico. Within a decade, Jaramillo was investigated as a fraud by the American Medical Association and the US Post Office. Borderlands Curanderos argues that it is not only state and professional institutions that build and maintain communities, nations, and national identities but also those less obviously powerful.
For a full list of entries and contributors, sample entries, and more, visit the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women website. Featuring comprehensive global coverage of women's issues and concerns, from violence and sexuality to feminist theory, the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women brings the field into the new millennium. In over 900 signed A-Z entries from US and Europe, Asia, the Americas, Oceania, and the Middle East, the women who pioneered the field from its inception collaborate with the new scholars who are shaping the future of women's studies to create the new standard work for anyone who needs information on women-related subjects.
