Licencias sociales para sanar: la construcción como expertos de salud de curanderas y curanderos en la Castilla del barroco

Abstract

This paper explores how in 17th century Castile healers, especially women healers, fashioned themselves as health agents, in a time when no official title accredited them as such. Particular attention will be given to the definition and representation of the individual self, understood as a strategy to demonstrate publicly their knowledge and skills to cure. In this way we aim to understand, from the context of medical pluralism, a mechanism that ensured the functioning of a medical culture that operated on the edge of the sphere of regulation. In order to reconstruct the traces left behind by these in general poorly documented irregular healers, this study uses as its sources trial proceedings from two regional tribunals of the Inquisition (tribunals of Cuenca and Toledo). Based on several case studies, the analysis focuses concretely on the way in which individuals represented themselves as healers in two very distinctive settings: within the courtroom while defending themselves against an accusation and outside of it, in the context of community, when promoting their skills to their audiences.