La enfermedades de las mujeres en la Nueva España, una taxonomía a través de las plantas emenagogas (siglo XVII)

Abstract

Indigenous women in the Central Highlands used a variety of herbalists resources to solve their illnesses. Some of these resources were recorded in the books on medicine, surgery and materia médica to be printed during the last decades of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century in New Spain. My aim in this article is to explore the spaces of intersection and ruptures between medical cultures that were registered there, one from the indigenous world and the other from the European world. To achieve this objective I made use of two texts that are today considered part of the Hernandinos material: Medicina verdadera, cirugía, y la astrología (real medicine, surgery, and astrology) (1607) and Cuatro Libros de la Naturaleza (1615), which are characterized among other things, to incorporate a considerable number of indigenous medicinal plants. I used as a guiding principle, the galenic, concept of emenagogo, as it allowed narrow my universe of study. It let me focus only on the therapeutic resources that were considered in the registration process by having one or more characteristics associated with menstruation. And also recognize the limits imposed by the very definition of the concept when classifying indigenous medicinal plants.

Keywords

• New Spain
• emmenagogues
• menstruation
• childbirth
• medicinal plants