The Gray Zones of Medicine

Healers and History in Latin America

Diego Armus, Pablo F. Gómez, Diego Armus, Pablo F. Gómez

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780822988434
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

Health practitioners working in gray zones, or between official and unofficial medicines, played a fundamental role in shaping Latin America from the colonial period onward. The Gray Zones of Medicine offers a human, relatable, complex examination of the history of health and healing in Latin America across five centuries. Contributors uncover how biographical narratives of individual actors—outside those of hegemonic biomedical knowledge, careers of successful doctors, public health initiatives, and research and medical institutions—can provide a unique window into larger social, cultural, political, and economic historical changes and continuities in the region. They reveal the power of such stories to illuminate intricacies and resilient features of the history of health and disease, and they demonstrate the importance of escaping analytical constraints posed by binary frameworks of legality/illegality, learned/popular, and orthodoxy/heterodoxy when writing about the past. Through an accessible and story-like format, this book unlocks the potential of historical narratives of healings to understand and give nuance to processes too frequently articulated through intellectual medical histories or the lenses of empires, nation-states, and their institutions.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Domingo de la Ascensión and the Criollo Healing Culture of the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean
• 2. The Curing World of María García, an Indigenous Healer in Eighteenth-Century Guatemala
• 3. Calundu: A Collective Biography of Spirit Possession in Bahia, 1618–Present
• 4. Dorotea Salguero and the Gendered Persecution of Unlicensed Healers in Early Republican Peru
• 5. Pai Domingos: Healing Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Bahia, Brazil
• 6. Mystic of Medicine, Modern Curandero, and “Médico Improvisado”: Francisco I. Madero and the Practice of Homeopathy in Rural Mexico at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
• 7. Herbs, Roots, Amulets, and Prayers in the Practices of “Saint” Vicente and other Healers in São Paulo in the 1910s
• 8. Recognition without a Diploma: The Wanderings of the Healer Indio Rondín in Early Twentieth-Century Colombia
• 9. The Miraculous Doctor Pun, Chinese Healers, and Their Patients in Lima, 1868–1930
• 10. Stepping through a Looking Glass: The Haitian Healer Mauricio Gastón on the Romana Sugar Mill in the Dominican Republic in 1938
• 11. Jesús Pueyo: The “Modern Argentine Pasteur” of the 1930s and 1940s
• 12. Doña Hermila Diego: Zapotec Healer, Entrepreneur, Social Activist, Media Star in Modern Mexico
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index