El saber médico de las curanderas novohispanas: un nicho femenino dentro del pluralismo médico del imperio Español

Abstract

This article explores the knowledge produced and employed by New Spain’s «curanderas» (women healers) in the course of the seventeenth century, as a form of knowledge that was part of the wider medical culture of the Spanish Empire during the baroque era. My central hypothesis suggests that curanderas’ medical knowledge was built through a complex process of cultural hybridization which brought together into one corpus, the practices, methods, therapies, rituals, ideas, and beliefs about health, illness and the human body associated with different traditions of knowledge and praxis, including indigenous, pre-hispanic, Western, African, and to a lesser degree, Asian traditions.It was precisely its hybrid character which made women’s medical knowledge useful and meaningful to both men and women of varied cultural provenance. My research takes as its point of departure the analysis of several inquisitorial documents, specifically accusations and trials against indigenous, Spanish, African, mestizo and mulata women of the American viceroyalty of New Spain.