Global Movements, Local Concerns: Medicine and Health in Southeast Asia

Chapter 5: Science, Sex, and Superstition: Midwifery in 19th-Century Philippines

Midwifery in 19th-Century Philippines 81 CHAPTER 5 Science, Sex, and Superstition: Midwifery in 19th-Century Philippines Raquel A.G. Reyes1 Introduction In 1859, a drawing of a traditional Filipino midwife, or hilot, appeared in Ilustración Filipina, a Spanish-language periodical published in Manila (Figure 5.1). The drawing seems innocuous enough: the hilot, named as Ñora Goya (an abbreviation of Señora Gregoria), is depicted as an old, slightly hunchbacked woman with wizened hands. A rosary and scapulars dangle around her neck. Beside her is a wooden table upon which is placed a basket filled with rags. This drawing was but one of many portraits of local folk who had caught the attention of a foreigner’s eyes on the lookout for the quaint and exotic. It belonged to a series of lithographs by the prolific English illustrator and traveler C.W. Andrews, whose vivid delineations of life in Manila and its rural environs were also published in The Illustrated London News. But the drawing did not appear in Ilustración merely to raise the mild interest of the magazine’s elite readership. The text accompanying the drawing, written by a Spaniard, describes the hilot as a reprehensible, even nefarious figure. Evidently wanting to shock the magazine’s readers, the writer says bluntly that the hilot has as much skill and knowledge as a cart driver or kitchen help. She possesses little or no understanding of the diverse parts and functions of the female reproductive organs. She has obtained her dubious accreditation by herencia (that is, through inheritance — the role being passed on from mother to daughter), tradición (tradition), or edad 81 82 Raquel A.G. Reyes Figure 5.1 ‘La Partera’ Ilustración Filipina, 1859 (image reproduced with thanks to Museo Oriental de Valladolid) Midwifery in 19th-Century Philippines 83 (age), and the basket of rags is her only tool of trade. “So many errors, so much carelessness and absurd practices!” the writer laments. And because of “abject ignorance,” “mothers and their babies are delivered into the hands of executioners!”2 José Rizal (1861–1896), the renowned Filipino novelist, polyglot, Western-trained physician, patriot and anti-cleric, similarly ridiculed the traditional hilot in a cartoon sketch that shows a heavily pregnant woman lying on the floor, apparently crying out in pain, and attended by a young girl (Figure 5.2).3 The caption, written in Tagalog and translated into English, reads: “Ay mother, I am dying!” “Do not fear that I am just a child,” the young girl replies, “I am a renowned hilot.” Despite her youth and implied lack of training, the hilot is bold enough to reassure the parturient woman that she is well known for her skills. Rizal is clearly mocking the fact that a mere child is allowed to practice midwifery. The girl’s ministrations, Rizal implies, have no basis other than religious faith — indicated by the detail of framed pictures of the crucifixion and saints hanging on the wall — and she draws her remedies only from an unhygienic, rag-filled box. Rizal was an outspoken critic of the Spanish friars, whose powerful influence in the Philippines he attacked as corrupt, oppressive and obscurantist. But Rizal was also contemptuous of his own compatriots, especially common folk and uneducated women whom he regarded as abysmally ignorant, superstitious and passive.4 Rizal probably drew his cartoon in the early 1890s, when he first began to write on aspects of sickness, sorcery and traditional medicine in the Philippines.5 These two illustrations exemplify the denigrating attitudes of Europeans and Western-trained Filipino physicians alike toward indigenous medicine and its practitioners in the late 19th century. Whilst the criticisms of elite Filipino physicians such as Rizal were infused with their own political agendas, as well as being professionally motivated, Spaniards were, in general, by the late 19th century, disparaging of local traditional medical practitioners, and their alleged irrational and superstitious nature. But their knowledge of medicinal plants and therapeutics was to an extent recognized as useful and it was not unknown for Europeans to take advantage of the choice that the medical market presented and consult local healers in addition to licensed physicians.6 This ambivalence partly stemmed, of course, from the fragmentary character of the public health infrastructure, which Spanish authorities had neither money nor the will to develop until the very last years of the 19th century. Parturition and maternal health care...