Masterly
Vodun Medicine is the uppermost level of the Haitian People’s Holistic Medical
System. Intrinsically niched in the Vodun culture, world view and religion which are
products of this people’s history, its operations include both the phytotherapeutic
social and medical systems. However, in linking the individual to his/her global social
and cosmological environment, this form of medicine goes beyond.
Addressing health through a complex assemblage of individual spiritual
entities which by convenience can be lumped and named "Soul" ("nanm")
and their dynamics, this medicine is concerned with the effect of that Soul upon the Body
and upon the Mind. Only here can one understand the linking of the somatic and the psyche,
the intrinsic globalizing level necessary to the process of healing, understood
then to be relieving human suffering as it is perceived and by no means the mere handling
of mechanical pathological disease processes.
