As the author correctly points out, there is a paucity of original sources concerning healing practices in pre-Hispanic and colonial Guatemala. Thus, recent local historians such as Carlos Martínez Durán, Francisco Asturias, Enrique Rossell, and Carlos Bernhard only dealt in fragmentary fashion with such an important topic. To remedy this, Sandra Orellana, an anthropologist, set out to produce an ethnohistorical study of such medical activities in highland Guatemala.
Her book is divided into three parts. In the first, which occupies almost half of the text, she examines both pre- and postconquest healing, including the causes proposed for various illnesses and rituals designed to cure them. Not surprisingly her emphasis is on herbal medicine, and, as Xavier Lozoya has done for Mexico, she presents lists of medicinal plants used in the treatment of specific symptom complexes.
A brief section describing the Spanish influence on native health and remedies is followed by an extensive third part, in which a more detailed analysis of medicinal plants is presented. Here the author returns once more to previously mentioned plants which are now presented in alphabetical order, all of them with their scientific and common names, constituents, pharmacological activity, and common usages.
Orellana has unquestionably produced a useful corpus of materials, but the book never transcends its descriptive and synthetic character. Historians will be disappointed by the complete lack of analysis, the reliance on questionable secondary sources such as Gordon Schendel, and the failure to explore the rich archival materials available at the Archivo General de Centroamerica. Interdisciplinary work is never easy but should be encouraged. However, just as historians using anthropological models must become thoroughly acquainted with the methods and models of that discipline, we must also demand from anthropologists working on past medical developments an equal familiarity with medical history and the questions it poses. On balance, rather than being a critical reconstruction, Orellana’s book will be a welcome addition to the sources of information from which future historians will draw for their work.
