The Purity of Water at Hospital and at Home as a Problem of Intercultural Understanding

Women in a provincial town in southern Nepal were instructed by medical doctors and compounders to boil water, and to keep it boiling for 15 minutes before mixing it with infant formula or oral rehydration salts. Most women ignored the advice. Those who seemed to follow it merely brought the water to boil. This report describes how and why women boil water and assesses the health implications of their practices. The failure of women to adopt “proper” procedures provides a point of entry into an analysis of the role of intercultural dialogue in exposing one's presuppositions about health and empowering one to change them.