Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 31 



Validation of diagnosis. — In principle, the conclusive test of a diag- 

 nosis is a cure. 



CASE 1 (Informant: Alima Huma : re) : 



Sudliu : ra was discharged from the reservation hospital as an incurable case 

 of tuberculosis. He was then treated by Hivsu : Tupo : ma, who attributed the 

 patient's illness to an old horse kick. The failure of his treatment proved that 

 the illness had been misdiagnosed, whereupon the patient was referred to me. 

 I treated him for ghost possession (hiwey lak nyevedhi:) and his condition im- 

 proved so much that everyone agreed that he had the hiwey lak nyevedhi: 

 illness. 



The Mohave react differently to shamans who lose several patients 

 in a row and shamans who simply misdiagnose a patient. The former 

 are believed to be witches (Hrdlicka, 1908; Kroeber, 1925 a) and 

 are sometimes killed (Devereux, 1937 c), while the latter are not 

 blamed for their failure to cure their patients, especially if they 

 specify in advance that their diagnosis is a tentative one and if, 

 after failing to cure the patient, they refer him to another kind of 

 specialist. It is hardly necessary to add that no shaman ever refers 

 a patient whom he failed to cure to another representative of his 

 own specialty, since such a referral either would imply an admission 

 that his powers are inferior to those of the shaman to whom he 

 referred the case or else would suggest that he is a witch, who de- 

 liberately mismanaged the treatment. This may explain why most 

 shamanistic diagnoses tend to be tentative ones. 



The Mohave know, of course, that even a correctly diagnosed and 

 appropriately treated patient may die. In such cases they 

 say that the patient failed to cooperate with the therapist (e. g., by 

 not revealing to him the name of the person who bewitched him), 

 or that the witch was more powerful than the therapist, or else that 

 the patient failed to consult a shaman before his illness became in- 

 curable. The notion that any illness, if diagnosed and treated in 

 time by a truly powerful shaman, may be incurable, seems to be alien 

 to the Mohave. 



This being said, there is no record of shamans accused of having 

 misdiagnosed a patient either in order to harm Mm or else in order 

 to earn money illegitimately, even though a fretful patient sometimes 

 unjustly accuses his therapist of having bewitched him (Case 44). 

 Indeed, it would be extremely risky for a shaman to pretend that 

 his patient has an illness that he is qualified to cure, since the utter 

 failure of his treatment would expose him to accusations of witch- 

 craft. It is also noteworthy that when an abnormally acquisitive 

 shaman wishes to recruit patients, he causes precisely the type of 

 epidemic that he is qualified to cure and, when consulted by his 



