I do not enjoy writing or reading critical reviews of bad books, so let me be brief. Gordon Schendel could have written an informal book on the state of Mexican medicine in this century, drawing on the first hand experiences of his friends and himself. It would have been an interesting and even valuable book, for he has lived in Mexico for some years and seems to know a good bit about the healing art, as practiced in his adopted homeland by M.D. and brujo.
He has attempted to write a full-scale history of Mexican medicine, however, a task for which he is not prepared by training, research, or temperament. His book has no footnotes, and the bibliographical notes at the end of the chapters too often refer to Prescott’s classic but outdated Conquest of Mexico or to such as “Early source material” and “Interviews with Mexican doctors on origins of diseases.” The text is no more scholarly. Was John Cabot really on Catalina Island, California, in 1526 (p. 107)? Was a substantial trade really “carried on by the far-traveling Aztec merchants with the Incas of Peru (p. 750)?
The style of writing tends to be too breathless, even by journalistic standards. One sentence paragraphs abound—page 64, for instance, has ten full paragraphs but only fourteen full sentences. Historical interpretations are often hysterical. For example, take the concluding sentence of chapter four: “If Aztec experimenters in medicine and pharmacology and experimenters in surgery had collaborated for a few generations, it is not impossible that the problem of foreign-body rejection could have been solved and successful organ transplants could have become feasible—over four hundred years ago!” Not impossible, just infinitely improbable.
