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Paul Brodwin, Medicine and morality in Haiti: the contest for healing power, Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology 3, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. xvi, 240, 50.00 (hardback 0-521-57029-8); 17.95 (paperback 0-521-57543-5).
This welcome addition to the literature on medical anthropology will be of interest to historians as well as social scientists and public health specialists. Paul Brodwin argues that in the rural Haitian community of Jeanty sick people set out to depict themselves as upright social actors, because illness can raise disturbing questions about personal guilt. When biomedicine cures, illness is perceived in the village as an "illness of God"; when it fails to cure, it is perceived as inflicted by other humans. According to the author, the Jeanty peasantry negotiates between different categories of healer-formal practitioners of Western biomedicine, herbalists, midwives and religious healers-and conflicting religious systems-Vodoun, Roman Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism, especially Pentecostalism. Brodwin argues persuasively that Haitians rework their religious identities in order to handle crises of illness and disease. As Haiti has undergone significant changes in the 1990s, notably the consolidation of the presence of international aid...