The Practice of Medicine in Yucatan and the Southern Gulf Coast, 1600-1830
Open Access
- Author:
- Martin, Rebekah Elizabeth
- Graduate Program:
- History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 17, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Matthew Bennett Restall, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Amara Leah Solari, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Matthew Bennett Restall, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Kathryn Elizabeth Salzer, Committee Member
Kent Russell Lohse, Committee Member
Bradford Albert Bouley, Committee Member
Colleen Connolly Ahern, Committee Member - Keywords:
- History of Medicine
Yucatan
New Spain
Legitimacy - Abstract:
- This study addresses issues of legitimate/illegitimate medical practices as they pertained to socially constructed and enforced identities in Yucatan and the southern Gulf Coast region, 1600-1830. Through an in-depth examination of colonial sources, I demonstrate that the social and legal legitimacy of medical practices were continuously negotiated between practitioners, patients, and the Spanish colonial authorities. Furthermore, I argue that existing historiographical analysis has reified boundaries and identities which existed only in law. While traditional scholarship has considered the categories of legitimate physician/illegitimate curandero to be oppositional, I show instead that such distinctions were, in practice, quite porous. Similarly, categories of illegitimate practice are often considered to be representative of the medical practice of women, indigenous peoples, and/or Afro-Mexicans, while Spanish physicians and surgeons alone performed the legitimate work of medicine. Yet in colonial Yucatan and the southern Gulf Coast region, medical practitioners could and did simultaneously occupy both legitimate and illegitimate categories of practice as well as move freely between those categories, depending on the circumstances. The exigencies of daily life, early modern beliefs about the nature of evil, and local politics all became factors in the determination of the legitimacy of medical practice and practitioners in a region characterized by the circulation of ideas and movement of people.