ABSTRACT
All stories have currency. They circulate like gold coins, from hand to hand; they are hoarded; they are polished; they are deployed, and they are coveted. Illness narratives are foundational manner of gathering data for medical anthropologists and have been used extensively over the last twenty-five years. Illness narratives are rich sources of cultural information that illustrate how people understand the functioning of their bodies within their particular cultural, social, environmental, and ideological contexts. Illness narratives are based on individual's unique understandings of how their bodies work—their ethno-physiological concepts. There are other signs at birth that a baby may be nawaal. When babies are born with lot of hair, this is a sign that they are nawaals. If the "nawaalness" of a person is not apparent at birth, then usually it is not fully diagnosed until the afflicted person can actually say that they have the disease.
