Brad R. Huber and Alan R. Sandstrom, editors Mesoamerican Healers.

Palmer, Steven

Brad R. Huber and Alan R. Sandstrom, editors Mesoamerican Healers Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2001, 403 pages

Indigenous Mesoamerican healers have long been an object of fascination for anthropologists, both because their ethnic otherness coincides with practices and beliefs that resist being subsumed under Western biomedicine, and because their mode of healing so often still retains an organic connection to community. Historians, on the other hand, have shown less interest in Mesoamerican healers, except during the time of Spanish contact. Hoping to get a glimpse of pre-Columbian medicine in the chronicles of the Conquest, and intrigued by the "ethno-scientific" exchange that took place immediately after this first contact, many a historian of medicine has fixed his or her gaze on indigenous medicine in the early colonial period. The Conquest-era findings of historians are often used by anthropologists working on contemporary indigenous cultures to prove that certain current practices are authentically pre-Columbian. This pursuit is, of course, a spurious one, since particular practices only have meaning within a much wider medical context, and the changes in the complex of indigenous medicine have been fundamental indeed.

Attempting to bridge these gaps, Huber and Sandstrom's compendium brings together 10 somewhat disparate studies by leading scholars in the field. It also includes two useful bibliography-based essays, one by each of the editors. The overall intent is to combine into one source work on Mesoamerican healers that has appeared scattered in different forms and venues over the past 50 years. The result is a very valuable, variegated, and rich collection, even though its attempt to provide a historical bridge between the Conquest era and the second half of the 20th century is not entirely successful.

The essay by Carlos Viesca Trevino on curanderismo in Mexico and Guatemala is a good example of the imbalance in historical assessments of the healer. Though Viesca Trevino purports to cover the period from the 16th to the 19th centuries, in fact virtually every piece of his evidence comes from the 16th and very early 17th century only. The sub-section on "the Nineteenth Century" offers no more than two paragraphs of generalities that take at face value official liberal edicts against traditional medical practices. Thanks in good measure to Luz Maria Hernandez's excellent work on Mexican medicine in the 18th and early 19th centuries, Learning to Heal, we know that the Mesoamerican reality of official regulation of unorthodox practice was more complicated. (1) While this study concentrates mainly on the elite level of medical education and practice, Hernandez contrasts this realm with case studies of two celebrated female curanderas of the same era, showing not only that they practiced conventional medicine and surgery as well as spiritual and herbal-based medicine, but also that their practices were not easy to criminalize or suppress even at the institutional heart of the Spanish empire.

In Mesoamerican Healers, Hernandez unites in co-authorship with Charles Foster to provide what is arguably the strongest and richest piece in the collection. Foster reprises his now classic argument on the Old World sources of humoral popular medicine, and it fits nicely within Hernandez's synthesis of the evolution of institutional medicine and general practice during the colonial era. The collection also contains fine versions of the important work on shamans by James Dow, and on Spiritualism by Kaja Finkler. There are, in addition, three valuable articles dealing with traditional midwives. The most dynamic and fresh of these is Elena Hurtado and Eugenia Saenz's study of the relations between indigenous midwives and government health workers in Guatemala in the 1990s, an account that raises some disturbing questions about whether new efforts to combine traditional with official medical approaches actually break with the biomedical paternalism of earlier periods.

This collection is an especially good reference work for anthropologists researching Mesoamerican healers and it would be a good teaching tool for undergraduate and graduate courses alike. On the historical side, unfortunately, we still await--impatiently--a study of the evolution of indigenous healing from the Conquest to the present, as it redefined itself in reference to an insistent and expansive Western medical array.

Note

(1) Luz Maria Hernandez Saenz, Learning to Heal: The Medical Profession in Colonial Mexico, 1767-1831 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997).

Steven Palmer, University of Windsor