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theses

This dissertation analyses the rise, fall, and rebirth of Spanish interest in indigenous medical knowledge in New Spain across the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Initial interest in integrating native medical knowledge into the European canon disintegrated by the 1600s as central Mexican native institutions continued to decline and as colonial leaders became increasingly convinced that satanism permeated native culture. However, in the eighteenth century professional physicians fought ecclesiastic institutions for jurisdiction of population health, while at the same time urban popular medical markets were claiming new legitimacy for “Indian medicines.” Medical syncretism was nothing new in the colony, yet these professionals now aimed to sever the (in their minds) sullied, mongrel networks of popular medical exchange and install themselves as the regulators of medical fusion. Soon they were celebrating native medical knowledge as the solution to humanity’s most pernicious woes, the colony’s stagnation, and their professional standing in the republic of letters.

This dissertation argues that this vogue for “Indian medicine” evidenced a broad and radical transformation in the ideological place of “Indios” within the colony, one that prefigured subsequent national conceptions. This shift brought professionals in contact and conflict with the plethora of syncretic medical cultures of New Spain through expeditions, experimental trials, and new institutions aimed at gathering native knowledge. This dissertation examines these networks of exchange, illuminating the means and methods, the barriers and negotiations, and the successes and failures of state-sponsored medical syncretism. I argue that colonial agents did not have the upper hand in their dealings with subaltern healers; indeed, Amerindian communities cannily bartered their highly valued secrets and were quick to abort transactions if the conditions were not in their favor. The consequence of professional blunders, imperial power relations and local politics, and contemporary scientific methodologies was that the project to redeem “Indian medicine” resulted in ignorance as much as, if not more than, viable knowledge.

ETD_9319

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Lance C. Thurner

doi:10.7282/t3-kt8q-5141

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.