Three Books. One Extraordinary Journey.

Erica Elliott was born into a large family, a Swiss mother and an American father, and moved from country to country through her father's work. She began school in England and finished it in Germany, spent a summer with the arts in Florence, then came to the United States for Antioch College. Medicine came later than for most of her classmates, after a decade spent on other work while she looked for her purpose. The books were written from the far side of that decade, which is why they read as a search rather than a career.

Four turnings hold the trilogy together: the week in 1971 when she nearly left the reservation in despair and instead started learning Navajo; the Andes, where in 1976 she became the first American woman to climb Aconcagua; the return to Cuba, New Mexico as a physician, fulfilling a prophecy; and the chemical illness and near-fatal accident that ended her life in conventional practice and began her work in environmental medicine.

The first memoir is the encounter, the second is the search that made the encounter possible, the third is the reckoning. Read in publication order the reader meets the doctor, then learns how she was made, then watches the doctor become a healer. Read in the order she lived them, the same events become one straight line from a classroom in Chinle to a consulting room in Santa Fe.

By her own account in the third memoir, she came to see that in order to graduate near the top of her class she had learned to silence her own common sense and experience, and only long afterwards understood why some of what she had been taught did not make sense. Patients in Santa Fe know her as the health detective, a name earned by going back to the questions that her training had trained her not to ask.

She has said her aim is to help readers believe they can cross seemingly impossible barriers of understanding between cultures, and the reservation she describes in 1971, the hogans, the trading posts, the single paved road, no longer exists in that form. The books hold a place and a period, and the people who taught her, as a record that would otherwise thin out with memory.