This work is a pathmarking study of the historical interaction of medical ideologies in Latin America. Specifically, it explains how, during the last third of the nineteenth century, scientific medicine became institutionalized while Catholic empiric healing traditions were “sublimated into ‘popular’ medicine” (p. xvi). The study focuses on one such faith-based healer, Miguel Perdomo Neira, and the opposition his methods provoked among “professional doctors” in Bogotá and Quito around 1870. Sowell aims both to demonstrate the “integrity and presence” of alternative healing traditions and to study historically their subordination to rational science. More ambitiously, he seeks to link the controversy over Perdomo’s medical practices to Colombia’s (and Latin America’s) conflicted and contested process of modernization during the (long) nineteenth century.
A first chapter on the colonial period traces the emergence of a pluralist “medical spectrum,” within which Perdomo and most healers operated. While “Hispanic medicine”—linking humoral knowledge with Catholic spirituality—was...
