The Dancing Healers: A Doctor's Journey of Healing with Native Americans

HarperCollins Publishers, 1988. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good . 8x5x0. Signed by Author. Brief gift inscription by and signed by author. This fascinating account of a Yale-trained psychiatrist's twenty-year experience with Native American healing interweaves autobiography with stories of the Native Americans who challenged his medical school assumptions about their methods.While working as a family physicans in a Native American hospital in the Southwest, Carl Hammerschlag was introduced to a patient named Santiago, a Pueblo priest and clan chief, who asked him where he had learned how to heal. Hammerschlag responded almost by rote, rattling off his medical education, intership, and certification.The old man replied,"Do you know how to dance?"To humor Santiago, Hammerschlag shuffled his feet at the priest's bedside. Despite his condition, Santiago got up and demonstrated the proper steps. "You must be able to dance if you are to heal people,"he admonished the young doctor. "I can teach you my steps, but you will have to hear your own music." Carl A. Hammerschlag was a master storyteller and internationally recognized author, physician, speaker and healer. A Yale-trained psychiatrist; he spent more than twenty years working with Native Americans. He was an expert on how to survive in rapidly changing cultures and one of the worlds leading proponents of Psychoneuroimmunology (mind-body-spirit medicine).