Lessons on Doctoring from Where There Is No Doctor

Late in 1983, in a remote Dou Donngo community on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia, a woman suffered an extensive burn to her back when she fell into a fire. The usual treatment for this injury was for a sando, a local healer and ritual specialist, to spit betel juice into the wound, a procedure called sampuru or ufi in the local language. One of us (PJ), doing ethnographic fieldwork in the community, was armed with a new publication, Where There Is No Doctor1, a medical how-to book then widely used by Peace Corps volunteers and others in remote settings.