03 Nov 2018 09:00 AM - 11:45 AM(America/Vancouver)
20181103T090020181103T1145America/VancouverContending Positions: Science, Medicine, and Religion in 19th- and 20th-century Mexico
How does the process of medicalization take place in a country when historians examine not reformers, but institutions and populations subject to medical reforms? Traditional histories of medicine have focused on the steps “great medical figures” took to adapt European medical sciences to the Mexican context. While valuable, this approach assumes that the process of medicalization concludes with the creation of modern medical institutions. But here is just where it starts. In the mid-19th century, most of Mexico’s population was mestizo, agrarian, Catholic, and illiterate. White and literate criollos lived in a few major urban centers from where they governed the country or administered their large states. Part of the latter group, doctors sought to modernize medical institutions by adopting enlightened science to transform medicine and society. The details of how different groups responded to this process of medicalization are just beginning to be studied. Papers in this panel examine the tensions between science, religion, and state-building in the medicalization of Mexican society in the 19th and 20th centuries at several levels, parishioners and their congregations confronting smallpox vaccination, patients and doctors at the maternity ward of an urban hospital, a “folk saint” and its devotees in the US-Mexican border, doctors questioning the epistemological, moral, and gender implications of the termination of pregnancy, and homeopathic practitioners challenging the straightforward adoption of Bacteriology and Physiology in the medical curriculum and practice. The picture that emerges is one of negotiations where medical traditions merged into plural approaches to healing.
Organized by Jethro Hernandez Berrones (Southwestern University)
...Ravenna B, Third FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
How does the process of medicalization take place in a country when historians examine not reformers, but institutions and populations subject to medical reforms? Traditional histories of medicine have focused on the steps “great medical figures” took to adapt European medical sciences to the Mexican context. While valuable, this approach assumes that the process of medicalization concludes with the creation of modern medical institutions. But here is just where it starts. In the mid-19th century, most of Mexico’s population was mestizo, agrarian, Catholic, and illiterate. White and literate criollos lived in a few major urban centers from where they governed the country or administered their large states. Part of the latter group, doctors sought to modernize medical institutions by adopting enlightened science to transform medicine and society. The details of how different groups responded to this process of medicalization are just beginning to be studied. Papers in this panel examine the tensions between science, religion, and state-building in the medicalization of Mexican society in the 19th and 20th centuries at several levels, parishioners and their congregations confronting smallpox vaccination, patients and doctors at the maternity ward of an urban hospital, a “folk saint” and its devotees in the US-Mexican border, doctors questioning the epistemological, moral, and gender implications of the termination of pregnancy, and homeopathic practitioners challenging the straightforward adoption of Bacteriology and Physiology in the medical curriculum and practice. The picture that emerges is one of negotiations where medical traditions merged into plural approaches to healing.
Organized by Jethro Hernandez Berrones (Southwestern University)
Unwanted Pregnancies and State Secularization in Mid-Nineteenth Century MexicoView Abstract Part of Organized SessionMedicine and Health09:00 AM - 09:33 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 16:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 16:33:00 UTC
In 1871, an unmarried twenty-five year old woman in Mexico City reportedly "fell prisoner to an emotional suffering that drowned her in a state of indescribable distress." According to the obstetricians of Mexico City's National Medical School, the señorita had become hysterical after having been impregnated and subsequently abandoned by her seductor. In order to restore her sanity, doctors insisted that the woman's seven-month fetus should be expelled prematurely by means of a surgical procedure called artificial premature birth. This paper uses medical writings to explore how Mexican doctors drew on ideas about hysteria and organic lesions in order to re-conceptualize the boundaries between "natural" and "unnatural" pregnancies, and in order to experiment with surgical methods of ending unwanted pregnancies. It also suggests that their efforts were in open defiance of an 1869 Papal declaration, which declared that the termination of pregnancy at any stage was a grave sin that merited excommunication. These debates—about fetal personhood and the interruption of pregnancy—cannot be separated from the context of Mexico's mid-century political climate, which was characterized by positivism in politics and scientific practice, on the one hand, and the secularizing impetus of Mexico's liberal reforma, on the other. The paper suggests that artificial premature birth was not just a novel abortive procedure—it was also part of the secularization of Mexican reproductive science. Secularization—however partial and contested—seemed to have occurred not just in state functions, but also in the epistemologies and ideologies surrounding reproduction and fertility control.
"How Do I Know… Prayers Don’t Do More Good than… Pills": Don Pedrito Jaramillo, Curanderismo, and the Rise of Professional Medicine in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands over the Turn-of-the-CenturyView Abstract Part of Organized SessionMedicine and Health09:33 AM - 10:06 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 16:33:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 17:06:00 UTC
This paper will explore the relationship and tensions between curanderismo–a traditional Mexican faith-healing practice–and professional medicine in the Mexico-Texas borderlands over the turn of the century by examining both the Mexican and U.S. government's attempts at regulating healing practices during this period.
This paper will focus on one curandero, Don Pedrito Jaramillo (1829-1907), who crossed the border from Mexico into Texas in the 1880’s and healed ethnic Mexicans on both sides of the border, while also drawing attention from professional medical associations, such as the American Medical Association and professional physicians in Northern Mexico, yet all the while maintaining a reputation as a gifted and benevolent healer among the people living in this borderlands. During his lifetime many of his adherents considered him a “folk saint”–unsanctioned by the Catholic Church yet revered by the people he healed.
This paper asks two questions: why was Don Pedrito Jaramillo such a popular healer among the people, and why did he draw the attention and ire of professional medicine? As scholars William Taylor, Frank Graziano, and Desirée A. Martín have shown, folk saint movements are strongest in places where institutions (government, church, professional medicine) are weak, such as the U.S.-Mexico borderlands at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet, as this paper will show, there was perhaps more in common between curanderismo and biomedicine than professionalizing medicine would acknowledge in this period where official institutions attempted to project their power and dominance into the borderlands.
Presenters Jennifer Seman Metropolitan State University Of Denver
Medicine in Revolution: Mapping Homeopathy in the Landscape of Mexican Medical Science, 1861-1934View Abstract Part of Organized SessionMedicine and Health10:06 AM - 10:39 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 17:06:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 17:39:00 UTC
As no other country in the Western Hemisphere, homeopathy consolidated as a medical science during the first two decades of the 20th century in Mexico. But what type of science homeopathy was? Three schools emerged as the providers of medical training in the city after the revolution (1910-1917), the National School of Medicine, the National School of Homeopathic Medicine, and the Free School of Homeopathy. These schools’ academic staff engaged in philosophical discussions explaining the relationship between medical science and homeopathy in the curriculum. The works of Fernando Ocaranza, David Cruz, and Higinio Pérez offer a set of views on the body, disease, and medicine that went from total rejection of alternative views such as homeopathy to total integration of science with homeopathy. Ocaranza used the new philosophical medicine of Claude Bernard to discredit the metaphysical explanations of bodily functions proposed by homeopathy. In the same line but emphasizing the importance of homeopathy, David Cruz proposed to use the mechanism of vaccination to explain the basis of homeopathy. Based on evolutionary, biological, physical and physiological arguments, Pérez discredited modern approaches to medicine that removed the human being as the center of all medical inquiries. He placed homeopathy as a medical science that explained how physical forces kept the natural world and the human body in balance. This paper examines their philosophical papers and places them in the context of reforms during and after the revolution that sought to continue the professionalizing and secularizing efforts of the Porfiriato (1884-1910).
Birth and Death in the Maternity Ward of the Guadalajara’s Hospital Civil, 1870-1940View Abstract Part of Organized SessionMedicine and Health10:39 AM - 11:12 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 17:39:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 18:12:00 UTC
This essay examines the maternity ward records in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico in order to understand the hospital as a space where mothers, doctors, and midwives encountered one another and the State, and where they sought to legitimize and define the field of medicine at a time when childbirth practices were contested and in flux. In spite of their different views of the body and healing, they also created medical treatments and new habits from these gendered and multiethnic encounters. The hospital became an important site for these groups to legitimate their work, craft their identities, and contest the work of their rivals. This essay makes a case for both understanding the hospital as a site for the production of a profession and as a place where the boundaries between “folk medicine” and professional medicine and between “local” and “universal” medical knowledge were interwoven.
As if They were Ministers of God: Religion and Epidemic Control in Nineteenth-Century MexicoView Abstract Part of Organized SessionMedicine and Health11:12 AM - 11:45 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 18:12:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 18:45:00 UTC
On a Sunday morning in 1805, Father Andrés Rosillo y Meruélo preached about a marvelous new discovery—a vaccine that promised to save his parishioners and their families from disease. The priest proclaimed in his sermon that day that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross not only enabled man’s eternal salvation but also freed him from the scourge of smallpox. Redemption from this plague came in the form of a vaccine, discovered just a few years before, and transported to the Spanish Americas in 1804. But this gift came with strings attached. Rosillo insisted that the vaccine be received fearfully and willingly, as a reminder to Church acolytes of their duties to God. Indeed, as a divine gift, remitted by King Carlos IV, vaccination was ostensibly both free and voluntary, requiring the consent of patients or parents throughout the Spanish Empire. In a moment increasingly identified by secularization and professionalization of medical science, this paper addresses the central role of parish priests in navigating the question of medical consent. Drawn from sermons, medical records, and colonial correspondence, I analyze an episode of epidemic outbreak and vaccine use to address key questions about the work of religion in Mexico at the intersection of state intervention, medical practice, and patient care.
Jennifer Seman