FYS Healing Women: Start Here

Not sure where to start your research? Click on the active links below to browse the SU WorldCat using subject headings:

• Birth customs Mexico
• Alternative medicine United States.
• Curanderos
• Childbirth Cross-cultural studies
• Christian Science History
• Healers
• Healers Latin America
• Healing History
• Hispanic American women healers Texas San Antonio
• Hmong Americans Medicine
• Indian women Medicine Great Plains
• Mayas Medicine
• Medical care Religious aspects
• Medicinal plants
• Medicine, African Traditional
• Medicine Philosophy History
• Medicine, Traditional
• Mapuche Indians Medicine
• New Age persons
• Midwifery history
• Midwives Latin America.
• Midwifery United States History
• Muslim women healers
• Obstetrics New England History 17th century
• Oglala Indians Rites and ceremonies
• Religion and Medicine
• Physicians, Women history
• Shamans Chile
• Shamanism
• Shamanism Korea
• Spiritual healing Mexico
• Spiritual healing South Asia
• Spiritual Therapies
• Spirit possession South Asia
• Sweatbaths Great Plains History
• Taoist women
• Traditional medicine Tanzania
• Traditional medicine Mexico
• Traditional medicine Europe
• Women and religion Cross-cultural studies
• Women in medicine History
• Women healers
• Women healers Cross-cultural studies
• Women physicians United States History
• Women shamans
• Women in medicine
• Women in medicine New England History 17th century.
• Women in medicine New England History 18th century
• Women mediums History 19th century

Go to the library at www.southwestern.edu/library-and-it/ to search the catalog [WorldCat@SU] and databases. Bookmark the site for future use. Also find the library in the Academic Life section of the SU app.

Create a list of words or concepts related to your topic and use them to search the catalog. Search results will include books, media, articles and more. To find just books, use the Refine This Search filters to limit Format to Books. The Description in a book's record includes contents and subject headings. Click on a Subjects link to find other books on the topic. You can also Browse the Shelf for related titles. 

Try a couple of these subjects in WorldCat@SU to get started:

women healers | traditional medicine | spiritual therapies | medicine religious aspects

The Wizard King’s granddaughters: Burmese Buddhist female mediums, healers, and dreamers

Missing links: Phoebe Palmer, Carrie Judd Montgomery, and holiness roots within Pentecostalism

From survival to respect: the narrative performances and ritual authority of a female Hindu healer

A mother's love: gender, altruism, and spiritual transformation

Rethinking Identity and Feminism: Contributions of Mapuche Women from Southern Chile

Woman as shaman: Reclaiming the power to heal

Black magic and illness in a Malaysian Chinese community 

Crying for a vision: the native American sweet lodge ceremony as therapeutic intervention

Paths of Power: Traditional Palestinian Women Healers in Israel

• The key to being a savvy online searcher is to use common search techniques that you can apply to almost any database, including article databases, online catalogs and even commercial search engines.
• This is important because searching library databases is a bit different from searching Google.
• The techniques described in this section will enable you to quickly retrieve relevant information from the thousands of records in a database.
• When you search a database and do not get the results you expect, ask us for advice.  Library staff are happy to help you find what you need.

Content created by MIT Libraries, adapted under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License.​

Always cite your sources! Providing a citation credits sources you use, helps other readers locate a source, and is an important element of academic honesty. 

For this course, choose either MLA or Turabian style and then consistently use that format for your citations.

Purdue OWL covers the basics of MLA formatting and style. For the most complete information, use the Handbook, available in the Research Commons and on Reserve.

Turabian Quick Guide covers the basics of Turabian style. The Student's Guide has more detailed information and can be found in the Research Commons and on Reserve.

Database searches yield the best results for articles. They allow you to search just for articles, and even to limit your results to scholarly sources. You can learn more about databases on the Research Hub. 

The databases listed here are particularly useful for this course.