In the landscape of traditional mountain medicine, mothers act as authentic uninitiated healers. Lacking the gift and the distinctive mystical recruitment of indigenous specialists, they nonetheless possess cosmological knowledge about the Nahua conception of the person and the health-disease processes that allow them to put therapeutic procedures into practice.
By David Lorente Fernandez
Mexico City, March 6 (However).- We present below an excerpt from the book The body, the soul, the word. Traditional medicine in the Sierra de Texcocoby the anthropologist David Lorente Fernández, published by Artes de México.
In the landscape of traditional mountain medicine, mothers act as authentic uninitiated healers. Lacking the gift and the distinctive mystical recruitment of indigenous specialists, they nonetheless possess cosmological knowledge about the Nahua conception of the person and the health-disease processes that allow them to put therapeutic procedures into practice. They are the first to make a diagnosis and therefore provide primary care to children. When illnesses exceed their powers, they decide the curative itineraries about when, to whom and in what order to go, acting as strategic enclaves between health centers and indigenous therapists. In constant dialogue with grandmothers and other women, mothers observe in their children the symptoms, signs and causes of various types of syndromes of cultural affiliation and biomedical ailments.
After subjecting them to the resources of family medicine, which incorporates herbs, foods, ritual procedures and loans from allopathic medicine, they recognize if the treatment is carried out by them, academic medicine or indigenous healers. Sometimes the cure implies a therapeutic itinerary in which the different medical systems are used, in a different order. In any case, the mother is the one who supervises the treatment and chooses how to proceed and who to go to at all times.
women’s medicine
The mothers of families have a sophisticated knowledge about the Nahua concepts of body and person that supports their work as therapists and allows them to diagnose and care for children when they present pathologies. This knowledge is tacit, does not manifest a systematization and is often evidenced in their actions and in what should or should not be done during the upbringing of a child so as not to negatively influence their growth or her health.
Children are fragile. For example, the first haircut is a delicate moment. It has to be done when he is already a year old, when he is already a little mature and already walking. If this is not the case, the child begins to get small, cry a lot, search for his hair and may stop growing well or fail to learn to speak; It affects your development. Physically it affects them. If their hair is cut before one year, babies get the flu, because their hair gets into the water. But the most dangerous thing is when he gets scared and feels sorry for him, so what we do is boil the little hair in water and give it to him to drink as tea. The spirit of the baby is also in the hair. If he is scared, he is given with water
so that he recovers that spirit that he lost and can heal. When I cut it for my children, I saved the hair from the first cut and also tried to do it on a full moon so that it would grow faster. That is the tradition, the hair from the first cut is always saved, but that of men, because women do not cut their hair, we always have braids, since we were little. The same goes for nails. If they are cut too early, before four months, the baby may not speak well. Their little nails are cut with their teeth and not with scissors. In my family they did it that way because if metal was used the child would get scared, he felt sorry for it. Before they kept the nails from the first cut, later they no longer.
If children don’t talk soon because their hair or nails were cut before the year, something can be done to remedy it; when the season of fruits comes, of the capulins, of the plums, the same ones that the little birds eat, they are given to talk.
Maternal knowledge includes complex knowledge about the functioning of the psychic system and its relationship with the bodily nature of the child.
(…) Kitchens are spaces where women acquire, build, enrich and transmit this knowledge. These are exclusively female areas where two or three generations carry out their daily activities.3 The dynamics of these spaces directly affect the predominance of women’s healing knowledge. Food is often a medical resource. The categories of hot and cold intervene in its preparation, and culinary practices are associated with the preparation of home remedies: the manipulation of medicinal herbs and the preparation of tisanes always takes place in the kitchen. While the men work abroad, either in the milpa or carrying out their activities in nearby cities, the women remain at home living with other relatives or neighbors with whom they talk, share their experiences or exchange ingredients to prepare remedies for a condition. children: clean eggs, holy water, flowers or medicinal herbs. Along with kitchens, home gardens are a place for the supply of therapeutic resources as well as for the reproduction of knowledge. These ecosystems, cultivated and wild at the same time, are cared for daily by women. In them they learn the place
preferred way of growing medicinal plants, if they are associated or like to be close to each other, if they need to reproduce in certain phases (such as the full moon, associated by the Nahuas with the general growth of beings) or if the herbs prosper alone. Thanks to the socialization of the gardens, women acquire a cultural knowledge that transcends the therapeutic uses of plants. Learning the classification of herbs as hot or cold allows women to progressively build the Nahua system of herbs.
diseases according to thermal categories.