Witch Doctors: Versus NHS

Abstract

This article is the author's personal account of the relationship between tribal witch doctors and practising European doctors in the Transkei region of South Africa, south of the Great Kei River, where the author's parents-in-law, both doctors of Scottish origin, ran a medical practice with a rudimentary hospital. It describes a village where European institutions and Xhosa tribal customs existed side by side. The article explains that witch doctors, or traditional healers, deal with maladies of the body, mind and spirit, act as both healers and holy men who call on the spirit world of the ancestors, and use bones, plant and animal extracts and methods comparable to psychosomatic and placebo effects. It also notes abhorrent practices, citing reported killings of people with albinism in Tanzania. Through examples from the work of the author's husband, a psychiatrist trained in England who spoke Xhosa fluently, it shows how local people valued the immediate impact of western treatments while he learned from the witch doctor's observational, psychosomatic approach to diagnosis. The author concludes that medicine in Africa and the UK are poles apart, that the gap can be bridged only to a point, and that clinicians need cultural respect and a broad perspective on their patients' beliefs, whether in Africa or in England.

Abstract prepared by the editorial office from the full text of the article; the authors did not supply one.