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Healers, Midwives, Healers and Doctors: The Arts of Healing in Modern Argentina
Director: Diego Armas
Publisher: Economic Culture Fund
In 1925, the newspaper La Nacion reported that Mother Mary “offered all, rich and poor, who cannot give science and refuses to give religion.” Although from the eighteenth century medicine began to define the object of its study and sought to become authoritative, it always referred to the art of medicine, practices and knowledge interested in providing some kind of cure and care for the ailments of the people. Did not succeed in displacing. What happens when the institutions of the health system are inadequate or inaccessible, or when people mistrust them? What happens outside those areas? What to do with diseases and ailments against which certified medicine fails to elicit an effective response? Diego Armas brings here a series of essays that show that those who practice the art of healing have, for centuries, participated in the therapeutic trajectory of rich and poor, educated or not, powerful or powerless. It also testifies to the permanent presence of these hybrids in the health care of vast areas of Argentine society from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is about traditions and cultures of meditation that are not static, but are the result of very diverse mixings, exchanges and reinterpretations. Physicians, midwives, physicians and doctors learn that medicine and medicalization form an uncertain, hesitant and constantly disputed territory. Trying to heal and trying to heal have been, are and will continue to be efforts marked by the most diverse offers of care.
