114 BUREAU OF AIiIERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



she should have felt impelled to bring about a miscarriage is, unfortunately, far 

 from clear, nor is it easy to see why, if she did wish to abort, she did not resort 

 to the standard Mohave method called amayk kavo:ram (on-back step=abor- 

 tion) (Devereux, 1948 d) and improvised instead the abortifacient technique of 

 riding horseback, which no primitive woman seems to use (Devereux, 1955 a). 

 However, since O : otc has had a lot of schooling, she may have heard that riding 

 horseback is sometimes resorted to by white women who wish to abort. 



(2) O : otc's recurrent dreams of death and of talking with ghosts should have 

 made her feel that she had either hiwey lak nyevedhi : or else nyevedhi : taha : na 

 while her dreams of hikwi : r snakes and of real snakes should have suggested to 

 her that she had the hikwi : r illness. Such, however, was not the case. Likewise, 

 when this case history was read to other informants, they too ignored these diag- 

 nostic clues and said she was suffering from hi : wa mava : rkh. This suggests 

 that their diagnosis — rightly, we believe — was determined primarily by O : otc's 

 reactive depression, rather than solely by the manifest content of her dreams. 



It should be noted that the fact that O : otc had psychiatric symptoms during 

 her illness was not common knowledge. Thus, Hama: Utce: was surprised to 

 learn that she had exhibited abnormal behavior while in the hospital, but took 

 this information into account when she too, though a layman, made the diagnosis 

 of hi : wa mava : rkh. As for Pulyi : k, who was likewise not a shaman, he de- 

 clared himself unable to offer a diagnosis. 



HI : WA HISA : HK (HEART ROT) 



This illness was never formally described as a syndrome. The in- 

 formant simply narrated the case history of an old woman and then 

 stated that she suffered from hi : wa hisa : hk. Tentatively speaking, 

 this disease entity does not seem to be one of the major Mohave diag- 

 nostic categories. Nyortc's illness appears to have been defined as a 

 "mental disorder" only because this old woman had peculiar dreams 

 and visions — which may not even have been true hallucinations — and 

 was depressed and anorexic as well. 



CASE 25 (Informants: Tcatc and E. S.) : 



Nyortc, of the Nyoltc gens, who died around 1928 at the approximate age of 70, 

 was the wife of J. P., who was already dead in 1938. (Tcatc momentarily con- 

 fused her with Mu : th Nyemsutkha : v, who was diagnosed as a hysteric by the 

 reservation physician, M. A. 1. Nettle, M. D.) 



Nyortc was not ill, i. e., she had no pains. She just had a tired feeling all the 

 time. One day she told me one of her dreams. She dreamed that she had died. 

 Also, when she went to the outhouse toilet and sat down on it, she used to see a 

 vision of herself. During the 3 years of her illness she got thinner and thinner, 

 because she had no appetite. They did not know what had caused this loss of 

 appetite, but they noticed that she coughed quite a bit. This was caused by 

 hi : wa hisa : hk. She was never "out of her mind" ; she was sane all the time. To 

 my knowledge she had never been to the hospital. No one thought that she had 

 been bewitched." 



Comment 



Tentative diagnosis. — Death from old age, perhaps complicated by an upper 

 respiratory infection and some neurotic anorexia. The one truly psychopatho- 



