32 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



victims, does his best to cure them, so as to get further patients 

 (Devereux, 1937 c) . In fact, the family of a bewitched person may 

 put pressure upon the witch to treat his victim, with the expectation 

 that the bewitcher's "better nature" or fear of consequences — and 

 presumably also the prospect of a fee — would induce him to effect 

 a cure. 



AMiile the Mohave were always lenient toward shamans who simply 

 misdiagnosed a case, their leniency in this respect appears to be even 

 greater nowadays than it was in aboriginal times. This impression 

 is based upon the repeated statements of both shamans and laymen 

 that nowadays the Mohave seldom suffer from uncomplicated 

 ("straight") diseases. They mostly have illnesses which are "not 

 straight," in that they involve certain complications, such as witch- 

 craft, or else contact with aliens and with alien food. Hence, it is not 

 always possible for a shaman to make a complete initial diagnosis. In- 

 deed, the fact that the patient's illness is not straight may become ap- 

 parent only when the first course of treatment brings about an im- 

 provement, but not a complete cure. In such cases the first therapist 

 simply declares that he had done his part and had cured that portion of 

 the illness that came within the scope of his special powers, and then 

 refers the patient to a specialist qualified to treat the remaining 

 component of the illness. 



It is therefore tentatively suggested that the current prevalence 

 of allegedly not straight illnesses may be responsible for the Mohave 

 belief that modern shamans are less powerful than those who plied 

 their trade in aboriginal times. On the other hand, the Mohave 

 themselves realize that contact with aliens led to the introduction of 

 genuinely new diseases. This insight is reflected not only by their 

 insistence that the chief cause of insanity is miscegenation and con- 

 tact with aliens (pt. 4, pp. 128-150) but, above all, by the revealing 

 belief that some time elapsed before shamans already qualified to 

 cure arrow wounds also acquired the power to treat bullet wounds. 



Summing up, Mohave diagnostic theory has at its roots the axiom 

 that "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" and that the effective- 

 ness or failure of the therapy is the most conclusive of all diagnostic 

 criteria. This touchstone of Mohave diagnostic science is, in many 

 ways, also used by modern medical scientists. Thus, according to 

 Kraepelin (1919), the crucial diagnostic criterion of schizophrenia 

 is its supposed chronicity and incurability. ^^ 



" It Bhould be noted that the discarding of this admittedly extreme point of view led 

 to the deleterious tendency to diagnose as schizophrenia a great many "transitory con- 

 fusional states" and forced nosologlsts to apply to the "classical" chronic schizophrenias 

 the term "nuclear" or "process" schizophrenia. 



