Traditional Medicine Among the Nahua: Contemporary and Ancient Medicinal Plants

Research design and methods

The ethnographic research focused on the healing specialists living in this village. There are nine healers in this village, two are men and seven are women. The healing specialists can be divided into three types: (1) curanderos and curanderas, the ritual specialists, who intercede for people with the supernatural realm and carry out major religious rituals, (2) parteras, the midwives, who use various techniques to treat women and preside over childbirth, and (3) sobadores and sobadoras, who set bones and displaced organs back into place through massage. The preceding categories are not discrete, since many of the specialists practice more than one type of healing technique. The curanderos and parteras use medicinal plants much more frequently than do the sobadores.

The healing specialists are very knowledgeable about the plants that can be used medicinally and regularly use them in their healing techniques. Some of the female healers are midwives and use the plants for the women they attend to; others prescribe them for illnesses such as espanto (soul loss/magical fright) or envidia (extreme jealousy); and others use them in complex healing rituals to drive away offending wind spirits (ehecatl) from their patient's body (Figure 5, shown below).

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I met and interacted on a regular basis with four of these healers as well as one lay healer who was considered to possess very deep and detailed knowledge about medicinal plants and their uses. All of them were women; they were interested in sharing their knowledge with me and were happy to show me the plants they used for healing. They possess an extensive knowledge of many plants and did not hesitate to talk about how they are recognized, used, and classified. I carried out unstructured and informal conversations with these healing specialists and also accompanied them when they collected the plants from their solares (house plots or home gardens), fields, or when they gathered them along paths and streams (see Del Ángel-Pérez and Mendoza 2004 for an in-depth study of home gardens in Veracruz). Figure 6, below, shows one of the women gathering plants along the local stream.

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