Ian Leslie tells a wonderful story about a certain Quesalid, a Kwakiutl shaman whom the anthropologist Franz Boas interviewed in 1887.[1] The Kwakiutl make their living from fishing. They are populating the islands, inlets, and sounds strewn between Vancouver Island and the Pacific coast of North America. As a young man, Quesalid was annoyed by the powerful shamans. He concocted a plan to expose them and started hanging around them. By and by, one of the shamans offered him apprenticeship. Soon enough he was taught how to simulate fainting and nervous fits. His worst suspicions were confirmed, for the art of shamans struck him as nothing more than shabby deceit. One day he was summoned by the family of a sick boy who had dreamt of Quesalid as his healer. Under the circumstances, he could not refuse the invitation. Having performed the usual ritual, which involved a sleight-of-hand he had already mastered, he went to the sick boy. The boy sat up. He was better already. “Without willing it,” Leslie concludes, “Quesalid had gone from posing as a shaman’s apprentice to being a shaman, and from being an enemy of deceit to the perpetrator of an illusion.”[2] Unbeknownst to Quesalid, Boas, and Leslie, the placebo effect is a key to healing not only under shamanism, but also under medicine at its best.

Addendum (November 16, 2011)

To be fair to Leslie, whose book I am reading helter-skelter, just as it was written, it should be added that he is quite aware of the placebo effect.[3] But he never makes the connection in his treatment of shamanism, or medicine of yesteryear. To wit, many a newfangled apprentice of medicine must have experienced Quesalid’s conundrum of going from posing as a doctor to actually being one. And for the very same reasons.

Footnotes

1. Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit, London: Quercus, 2011, pp. 329-333.

2. Op. cit., p. 333.

3. Op. cit., pp. 242-248.