in addition to the d u k u n s , tib a n or common, to whom they have access, Mod
jokuto Javanese have two other possible sources of help in the face of dis
ease: home curing and the more or less scientific Western-type medical care provided by the two hospitals in town.
The home curing methods are several. There are various kinds of amulets, such as small daggers worn inside the belt or pebbles strung around one’s neck. There are packaged medicines of the “good for all that ails you” type, which traveling salesmen áre forever hawking in the market or the town square. There are Chinese drugs, such as ground dragon’s tongue, which can be purchased at the local Chinese drugstores (while one waits they are mixed up by the druggist (sin g s è h), to whom one has described his symptoms).
There are the special time-honored techniques for specific diseases (e.g., polli- wogs rubbed on the skin for measles). And there are the peculiar, all-purpose protectors the Javanese call d jim a ts. Commonly, a d jim a t is a written amulet, usually in Arabic and often made by the more old-fashioned Koranic scholars for their followers. They not only cure but also may be worn, like amulets generally, as invulnerability charms or as instruments of sorcery. The term
d jim a t also tends to be used for a “snips and snails” kind of medicine in which otherwise repulsive substances, particularly waste products from one’s own body, are ingested, worn, or hung over the doorway. The following is a fair sample:
He described another of these djimats to me. When the baby is newly bom, the palms of its hands are wet with a kind of white oil. One blots this up with a tiny piece of kapok. Soon afterwards the baby will have his first bowel movement. “The faeces are always black,” said Wirjo, “like black rice por-
»104« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A ridge. You keep this and put the kapok in it. In a day or so the stub of the umbilical cord falls off, and you add that to the collection. On the thirty-fifth day he gets his first haircut, and you put the clippings in the collection too, and you save the whole business, and later when the child is about 15 years old (if he is ill, or for general protection against illness, or general spiritual strength), you go out and buy him a gold ring which is the same weight as all this stuff and then he wears the ring and eats the stuff (he can put it in a banana to make it go down easier) and the child will be strong. He won’t have to go to a specialist, for he has his own djimat.”
The patent medicines, with their supposed scientific legitimacy, their ap
peal to the Javanese conviction that the West, whatever its spiritual draw
backs, has discovered the technological key to all the material problems of life, and the extreme simplicity of applying them (“take two spoonfuls for tubercu
losis, three for indigestion” ), stand halfway between the indigenous curing system and the intrusive system of Western-type medical care institutionalized in the town’s two hospitals, its three Western-trained doctors, and its group of locally trained male nurses (mantri). Patent medicines are advertised in the newspapers and sold in the stores, but the most vivid hawking of them is by the traveling medicine men who can be found three or four times a week at the center of a large crowd in the town square and almost every day in the market.
I took a walk in the morning. There was a man in the town square under the sacred banyan tree selling patent medicine. He was dressed in Western style with a white shirt, polka-dot brown and yellow tie, two-tone shoes, and slicked- down hair. About 25 to 30 years old, he spoke with great rapidity, all in Indo
nesian. He said his medicine was good for everything from heart trouble, coughing (he coughed as an example), and stomach ailments to insanity. He said he was from Djakarta and in Djakarta all the government leaders used this medicine regularly. He said in America too they used it and mentioned something about Eisenhower. He had pictures from Life magazine and various medical journals, all in glorious Technicolor, spread on the ground. He said that when one eats all the food goes into the stomach and gets all messed up.
He put some food in a glass of liquid and showed how repulsive it looked after a while. Americans, he said, and Djakarta people are always cleaning out their stomachs, but Indonesians may go two, three, four years without doing so. He said the medicine was made in Djakarta, not by stupid people, but by clever ones—specialists in chemistry. He said that if one’s blood gets dirty, this affects all the parts of the body—the lungs (he coughed, wheezed; showed pictures of X-rays of chest) ; the head (he picked up a cutaway picture of the skull). It gives one smallpox (he had a picture of that); bowel trouble (he gave imitation of someone trying to evacuate and not being able to do so; he had a picture of the bowels, too). It disturbs a woman’s menstruation (he gave an imitation of a groaning woman, “Oh, my husband! . . . Oh!” ); and it causes syphilis (he had a picture of a diseased penis all shrunken up). He went on about syphilis, saying that it spreads from the penis to the face, and one loses his nose and has to get a rubber nose, called an “atom” nose, and when one is riding along in a betjak (bicycle rickshaw) and it stops, the nose flies off. He also had a picture of a model all cut open in various parts, saying that if one didn’t take his medicine, later the doctor would cut him up. He
»105«
pulled out a small bottle of penicillin and quoted how much it cost compared to his one-rupiah medicine. He demonstrated his medicine, which was a crystal which fizzed in water, and then sold a dozen or more packages, packed up, and went off.
The three doctors* and two hospitals in the small town of Modjokuto are certainly not typical for Java. It is rather the accidental result of three circum
stances. One of the two main East Java hospitals of the Handelsvereniging Amsterdam (HVA), the huge prewar Dutch plantation concern, happens to be located in Modjokuto. Mainly because a building was available, the govern
ment hospital for the whole of the Bragang area comprising four districts and hundreds of thousands of people happens to be located in Modjokuto rather than in Bragang, the capital city of the area, as it normally would be. And the man who was the government doctor is now past retirement age and has been replaced in the hospital itself by an imported Austrian doctor, but, owing to the shortage of doctors in Indonesia generally, continues to travel around the rural areas holding clinics and still maintains some of his private practice within the town itself. As a result, Modjokuto is something of a medical cen
ter; but for most abangans this can hardly be said to be of much importance in their life, except insofar as it provides them with jobs as launderers, jani
tors, gardeners, and ambulance drivers.
Only a few of the higher-status people of some wealth go to the HVA hospital in any case, unless they happen to be employees of the company, for the fees for private patients are exorbitant. The government’s hospital main
tains a daily clinic for a flat fee of one-half rupiah, and many people in the town itself (but relatively few outside of it) go to it each day; but the patient- doctor ratio is so extremely large and the financial resources of most people with which to pay for any extended medical care so sharply limited that only minimal treatment is possible. As a result, the main contact that most people in the Modjokuto area have with the hospitals and with rational scientific medicine is through the male nurses called mantri.
Generally trained for simple laboratory work or pharmacy, the mantris are forbidden by law to dispense medicines, but as a matter of fact they do so quite freely. For many people, going to a mantri has replaced or supplemented going to a diikun, with the result that the mantris are carrying a rather strik
ing amount of the medical load in Java these days and have become a mod
ernized version of the traditional curing specialist. Where the dukun has spells and herbs, the mantri has pills and injections, and there is apparently little greater scientific understanding of illness in the latter case than in the former.
The mantri has become the agent for the Javanese reinterpretation of Western medicine and has simply been added to the traditional armory of curing means available to the average Javanese.
People everywhere tend to face a crisis such as illness with all the cultural resources upon which they can call and to interpret what they are doing in terms of the categories which they learned as children; and so the Javanese
* Of the three doctors, one was an Indonesian from Sumatra who received his medical education in France, the second was an Austrian trained in Austria, and the third was a Javanese who studied medicine in Djakarta.
Curing, Sorcery, and Magic
»106« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A flails at his health difficulties with any stick his culture gives him and sees im
ported methods as but new elements in an age-old pattern. Dukuns, herbs, patent medicines, mantris, and doctors— all get called into play in a desperate attempt to alter an impossible situation, but somehow in the end the vivid word pictures of the dukun give him an edge on his new-fangled competitors.
mBok Minah, the woman who lives next door, has a granddaughter, Ti, aged about two, who has been sick for the past two weeks—so seriously that at one point she was given up for dead. They said she had a very high fever and nothing much else in the way of symptoms. At the height of the fever her nose bled. Now the fever has subsided, but the little girl has regressed to babyhood
— only suckles and won’t talk, although it is evident she understands what is said to her. She is completely flaccid, won’t respond to people, just looks at them. If she isn’t fed, she makes no indication she is hungry. . . . Pak Ardjo (our landlord) said a dukun had discovered that the child was possessed by spirits, and everyone seems to agree with this diagnosis. While she had the fever, many kinds of herb remedies were tried, every neighbor suggesting a different one. The child was taken to the mantri, Pak Wisto, who “injected”
her and gave her some cough medicine (although she had no cough). Several Chinese medicines from the drugstores were tried, and the famous Chinese patent medicine “Tiger Balm” was rubbed on her. She was at length taken to Pale Harso (the semi-retired government doctor), who said he could find no illness. This was after the fever had subsided. In between times several dukuns were called but all without change. After all this, Pak Ardjo suggested a dukun who works on the railroad, and the man came and said a spell over some salt and spread it on the child and went out back to examine the river.
He then said the trouble was that the child had played or urinated in the river without the parents noticing it and had upset the games of four little spirit children, who live 15 yards up the river in the clump of bamboo trees behind the house, and the spirit children were angry and made her sick. The spirit children didn’t actually enter the sick child, being too small and weak to do so, but just stood by her side pressing up against her. If they did enter her, she would die. The reason she was so sick was that there were four of these spirit children after her. . . . The notion that it was urinating in the river that caused the trouble is a common one and had been advanced as a theory by some of the women around her before the dukun himself came.