In their own hands: domestic medicine and ‘the cure of all kinds of tertian and quartan fevers’ in late-colonial Lima

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which the men and women of Lima sought to cure or ward off ‘tertian and quartan fevers’, by all accounts one of the city's most ubiquitous illnesses during the last decades of Spanish colonial rule. The paper's particular emphasis therein rests on practices of self-medication and household medicine: it traces how Lima's inhabitants were able to practice elementary medicine and to concoct remedies ‘for the cure of tertian and quartan fevers’ by themselves, and how they consulted various genres of popular print to circulate health advice–the yearly almanac and a range of ‘enlightened’ home medical guides–and notebooks of medical recipes to safeguard their own health in the face of that ailment. The paper argues that these practices of vernacular medical healing, and the ‘ways of knowing’ that informed and sustained them, were shared both across different sectors of colonial society and with societies across the Atlantic. The study of vernacular, domestic medical practices in the face of a quotidian, commonplace ailment thus not only provides a rare window into sickness episodes, medical learning and skilfulness, in late-colonial Lima households, it also contributes to an on-going reworking of the historiography of Spanish American science and medicine by thinking beyond, and fragmenting a ‘dichotomous view of knowledge’–of polarizations of professional versus lay, popular versus elite, Iberian versus Northern European, or, indeed, ‘indigenous’ versus ‘Western’