In their own hands

Domestic medicine and ‘the cure of all kinds of tertian and quartan fevers’ in late-colonial Lima

Datos Bibliográficos

ID7094409
AutoresStefanie Gänger (0000-0001-5690-0022, autor de correspondencia)
Año2016
Volumen25
Número4
Páginas492-511
Fecha de publicación2016-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaColonial Latin American Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1060-9164 • E-ISSN: 1466-1802
EditorialRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10609164.2016.1281009
OpenAlexW2597107412
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas28

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