ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Criminalization of Female Medical Practitioners During the Spanish and Mexican Inquisitions

• In Event: The Long-longue Durée of Iberian Science and Medicine

English Abstract

Recent scholarship engaging concepts of medical pluralism, hybridity, or medical mestizaje within histories of Early Modern medicine and Empire look beyond institutions and texts printed by licensed practitioners. Across Inquisition and criminal proceedings, non-licensed practitioners operating within the broader medical markets of both Spain and New Spain–often women, minor clergy, or indigenous or African practitioners–received scrutiny for unlicensed medical practices and treatments, including the use of rings and medals, abortifacients, ensalmos or incantations, and in the case of New Spain, peyote, and chocolate mixed with menstrual blood.

This paper traces the development of this medical “pluralism” in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century New Spain, Iberia, and between the two territories. It approaches the history of medical hybridity as a dynamic process in which European, Indigenous, African, and colonial medical frameworks existed and developed, while also reflecting fluid negotiations of inequality and power through which medical information was mediated and differences across cultures and peoples assessed. Focusing on the roles of unlicensed female practitioners working in colonial and Spanish society, it analyzes accounts of popular medical practices within Spanish and Mexican Inquisition materials in relation to their local religious, medical, and cultural contexts, and considers how processes of “hybrid” or pluralistic medicine may have been shaped within Iberia and the Spanish colonies, what such processes looked like in practice, and how they changed over time in terms of divisions of gendered medical labor and women’s medicine practiced within the home. It asks: what specific geographical, religious, and cultural elements influenced the activities of female practitioners in Spain and New Spain, and how they were scrutinized by the Inquisition? How does female labor operate within “hybrid” medical spaces in which multiple traditions were employed in tandem or tension? And how can focus on the demand, efficacy, and economy of medical practice within “hybrid” spaces influence the shifting composition of “professional” and “popular,” “colonial” or “Spanish” medicine in historical scholarship?

Author

• Katherine White, University of California, San Diego