Popular and Modern Medicine in Mestizo Communities of Coastal Peru and Chile

Abstract

HE present paper represents an attempt to delineate the key patterns of Mestizo popular medicine and to analyze their implications for the reception accorded modern medicine by examining the nature and degree of acculturation to the latter that has already occurred. In working with professional personneldoctors, nurses, and health educators-engaged in action programs of public health in Peru and Chile, the writer encountered a pervasive preconception that the task of educating local populations in the concepts and practices of modern medicine is largely a matter of filling a mental vacuum, of providing information for the uninformed. There seems to be little awareness on their part that the need for emotional adjustment and cognitive orientation to the anxiety-arousing situations produced by such frustrating experiences as disease and death has characteristically led to the development and elaboration in all known societies of beliefs and practices for coping with these uncertainties. Popular medical beliefs and practices are ordinarily deeply rooted in the basic assumptions of a culture and provide more or less complete explanations of illness and of the appropriate means for dealing with it. Consequently, any serious attempt at converting so-called under-developed peoples to modern health practices will require not only some knowledge of their popular medicine but an assessment of its most receptive and resistant points with regard to modern medicine.