The medical model of disability deeply influences people's reactions to disability by emphasizing the need for cure. Accordingly, normalizing disabled bodies, through cure, has been a key feature of most narratives addressing disability. The exclusionary practices of normative discourses hindered viewing disability as a bodily variation. This paper examines Rudolfo A. Anaya's deployment of disability in his novel Tortuga (1979). It explores the interplay between curandersimo and modern medicine as two interrelated curative discourses. The paper argues that because normalizing the body is a narrative end, Anaya falls short in his attempts to negotiate ableist ideals through curandersimo's holistic approach to healing. It argues that Anaya adopts an ableist ideological framework in his representation of disability through 1) emphasizing the need for a cure, 2) associating masculinity with the ability to walk, 3) the isolation of the hospital patients from society, and 4) an ambivalent attitude towards assisted suicide.