To Taste a Hundred Herbs: Gods, Ancestors and Medicine in a Chinese Village takes us into the warm circle of a peasant doctor, Dr. Shen, in whom the word healer expands to fit his role in the community as a trusted friend as well as the bearer of a very precise knowledge. Trained by his father and grandfather, Dr. Shen makes use of both traditional and Western medical practices. But it is his unusual skill at treating mental illness with traditional methods that has brought him patients from well beyond the local area, many of whom have failed to be cured in modern hospitals. It is fascinating to witness the hallucinations of one patient, and then to see him, weeks later, speaking coherently about his experience. Gordon and Hinton have the same easy intimacy with their subject as he seems to have with his world. Still, as a member of the Catholic minority, Dr. Shen is different from those who practice the "big religion." By way of exploring this difference, the film takes us on a veritable tour of the household gods who dwell very much in the present-day lives of country families. Finally, in Dr. Shen we find a witness to the upheavals, advances and failures that have shaped the countryside over the past 35 years-and an incorrigible optimist who believes that "kindness will ultimately be rewarded by kindness."