Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman (North

Atlantic Books 1999)

His early patients usually were poor mestizos and people of the forest tribes.
While living on remote quino Isla, he attended a friend with a severe skin rash
erupting all over his body that was thought to be leprosy but which Crdova
diagnosed as pellagra (due to a poor diet), and a woman with a continuing flow
of blood after childbirth. Both cures were effected by herbal extracts. "When it
became known by word of mouth that I could cure people they came from far
and near for help." Mentioned are other Amazon treatments for: alcoholism (a
cure learned from chief Huanichi of the Capanahua), diabetes, and epilepsy. Later
in Iquitos he cured a young girl with a lung infection doctors thought tubercular,
but Crdova tracked it to a festering wound in her foot that had superficially
healed over, but whose infection had migrated to her lungs. His reputation grew.
A judge called Crdova about his seriously ill daughter for whom doctors "could
do nothing more"; after an interview and exam, and by using ayahuasca, he
found that her liver was the problem's source and prepared several plant
extracts: first to "detoxify" her from prior "improper medication", and then to
treat her liver.
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