In their own hands
Domestic medicine and ‘the cure of all kinds of tertian and quartan fevers’ in late-colonial Lima
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7094409 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stefanie Gänger (0000-0001-5690-0022, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 492-511 |
| Publication date | 2016-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Colonial Latin American Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1060-9164 • E-ISSN: 1466-1802 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10609164.2016.1281009 |
| OpenAlex | W2597107412 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 28 |
This paper examines the ways in which the men and women of Lima sought to cure or ward off ‘tertian and quartan fevers’, by all accounts one of the city's most ubiquitous illnesses during the last decades of Spanish colonial rule. The paper's particular emphasis therein rests on practices of self-medication and household medicine: it traces how Lima's inhabitants were able to practice elementary medicine and to concoct remedies ‘for the cure of tertian and quartan fevers’ by themselves, and how they consulted various genres of popular print to circulate health advice–the yearly almanac and a range of ‘enlightened’ home medical guides–and notebooks of medical recipes to safeguard their own health in the face of that ailment. The paper argues that these practices of vernacular medical healing, and the ‘ways of knowing’ that informed and sustained them, were shared both across different sectors of colonial society and with societies across the Atlantic. The study of vernacular, domestic medical practices in the face of a quotidian, commonplace ailment thus not only provides a rare window into sickness episodes, medical learning and skilfulness, in late-colonial Lima households, it also contributes to an on-going reworking of the historiography of Spanish American science and medicine by thinking beyond, and fragmenting a ‘dichotomous view of knowledge’–of polarizations of professional versus lay, popular versus elite, Iberian versus Northern European, or, indeed, ‘indigenous’ versus ‘Western
Annexation · Art · Colonialism · Elite · Face (sociological concept · Historiography · Indigenous · Literature · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Vernacular · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Medicine and Tropical Health · Medicine · History · Law
The Andean Wonder Drug
From Natural History to Popular Remedy
Explaining epidemics and other studies in the history of medicine
Krankheit als politisches Problem 1770-1880
Beyond the Lettered City
Population and Ethnicity in Early Republican Peru
Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household
From Herbs to Alchemy
Introduction
Recetarios
Transiciones sombrías
The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima
The ‘Alienated’ Body
The Relative Duties of a Man
The turn of the body
Knowledge in Transit
Sciences and the Global
On the Origin of Humoral Medicine in Latin America
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |