Health and Healing in Early Modern Mexico: A study of cultural exchange

FAIN: FT-57138-09

Millie Gimmel
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37916-3801)

I am engaged in a long-term study of medical practices in early modern Mexico, emphasizing the bicultural medicine that arose as a result of the Spanish conquest and the interaction of Europeans and native peoples. Up until now I have studied and published on texts that are available in editions or facsimile and the next stage of my project includes spending two months researching the holdings of several Mexican archives to better our understanding of everyday medical practices of the period. The end result of these investigations will be a monograph on the state of medicine in the bicultural and intercultural communities that constituted early modern Mexico. Since how a culture views the body and its care reflects many facets of that society, understanding medical practice and theory in early modern Mexico helps us to understand and frame bicultural experience in many of its aspects, whether in the sixteenth century or the twenty-first.