cooling mudpacks: the aesthetic quality of therapy 191
ayurveda off ers. Although he yearned for loftier goals in treating illness, Ajit
explained that allopathic treatment could fi x a fever or other problems so that
one could get back to work or school. Allopathy can help a person become
functional again quickly so that he can return to his obligations. Th e idea of
curing and health as remediation are thus appropriate to peoples’ busy life-
styles. Ganga, a Hindu woman who professes a faith in ayurvedic healing and
whose in-laws are ayurvedic healers, was nevertheless receiving inpatient treat-
ment at an allopathic psychiatric hospital for problems that included loss of
consciousness, using abusive words toward her mother and problems eating.
Ganga concurred with Ajit’s view of allopathy which she says she uses for
quick, temporary relief:
Ganga: My husband’s family is full of ayurvedic people, ayurvedic vaidyans
[doctors]. My husband’s father and uncle are vaidyans. So the whole family are
vaidyans in ayurveda. So for quick [pettennu] relief only we came here. After this
we will do ayurvedic treatment.Kavitha: You believe in that?Ganga: I very much believe in that. For immediate relief only we came here.Ganga added that after she leaves the hospital she plans to use ayurvedic
treatments at home with help from her husband and his family. Ganga and
Ajit’s observations represent tensions between the pleasantness and the speed
of the healing process which raise compelling questions about pleasure, the
nature of health and the speed of contemporary life.
Notes
- For example, none of the articles in a volume called Culture and Curing (Morley
and Wallis, eds. 1979) examines the concept of cure. It seems to be assumed that
this is what the various healing systems discussed in the volume try to do in all
contexts. Or, in an article called “Closure as Cure” (1986), Herzfeld explains that
narrative closure in stories that are told by Greek healers help eff ect cure, in the
sense of getting rid of a problem and returning to an original state of health.
Th ese works are highlighted here because the word “cure” appears prominently in
their titles, but this term is regularly and casually used in many works of medical
anthropology.
As casual assumptions about curing are too frequent to review compre-
hensively, I will mention just a few sources cited in other sections of this study
that employ this concept uncritically. Th ese examples should not be seen as espe-
cially problematic uses of this concept but rather as typical examples of a regular