The gray zones of medicine : healers and history in Latin America

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. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction | Diego Armus and Pablo F. Gómez 1. Domingo de la Ascensión and the Criollo Healing Culture of the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean | Pablo F. Gómez 2. The Curing World of María García, an Indigenous Healer in Eighteenth-Century Guatemala | Martha Few 3. Calundu: A Collective Biography of Spirit Possession in Bahia, 1618–Present | James H. Sweet 4. Dorotea Salguero and the Gendered Persecution of Unlicensed Healers in Early Republican Peru | Adam Warren 5. Pai Domingos: Healing Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Bahia, Brazil | João José Reis 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 | Jethro Hernández Berrones 7. Herbs, Roots, Amulets, and Prayers in the Practices of “Saint” Vicente and other Healers in São Paulo in the 1910s | Liane Maria Bertucci 8. Recognition without a Diploma: The Wanderings of the Healer Indio Rondín in Early Twentieth-Century Colombia | Victoria Estrada and Jorge Márquez Valderrama 9. The Miraculous Doctor Pun, Chinese Healers, and Their Patients in Lima, 1868–1930 | Patricia Palma and José Ragas 10. Stepping through a Looking Glass: The Haitian Healer Mauricio Gastón on the Romana Sugar Mill in the Dominican Republic in 1938 | Alberto Ortiz Díaz 11. Jesús Pueyo: The “Modern Argentine Pasteur” of the 1930s and 1940s | Diego Armus 12. Doña Hermila Diego: Zapotec Healer, Entrepreneur, Social Activist, Media Star in Modern Mexico | Gabriela Soto Laveaga Notes Selected Bibliography List of Contributors Index Winner, 2022 Outstanding Academic Title, CHOICE Awards 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. "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"-- Provided by publisher An investigation into how health practitioners working between official and unofficial medicines shaped Latin America.