The Tale of Healer Miguel Perdomo Neira: Medicine, Ideologies, and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Andes (review)

Perhaps you have had the experience of David Sowell, author of The Tale of Healer Miguel Perdomo Neira: Medicine, Ideologies, and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Andes. He was doing archival research in Colombia and happened upon some interesting papers that were, nonetheless, quite peripheral to his project at the time. These papers referred to an unlicensed medical practitioner who was winning popular support in the cities and towns of the northern Andes and whose life seemed to say something important about nineteenth-century struggles between scientists and the church. To his great credit, Sowell returned to those papers after completing his original research and went on to write an engaging book that sheds light on the nineteenth-century social history of Latin America.

Although Sowell does not systematically address himself to any specific indigenous or tribal group in his study, The Tale of Healer Miguel Perdomo Neira will be of interest to many ethnohistorians. Sowell uses contemporary ethnographic accounts to reconstruct key features of precontact indigenous healing systems and build a more complete description of lightly documented colonial and postcolonial curing practices of the northern Andes. Perdomo Neira, a Conservative, took refuge in an indigenous town while hiding out from the Liberal-controlled Colombian army and seems to have learned some of his curing techniques there. Subsequently he used these techniques along with European-derived humoral approaches in his doctoring to villagers and the urban poor throughout Colombia. Thus, Sowell ties an upstreamed understanding of nineteenth-century indigenous and popular medicine with the life and times of Miguel Perdomo Neira himself. In this regard, I was reminded of the Mexican-based historian Jean Meyer, who described his attempts to understand the life of nineteenth-century rebel leader Manuel Lozada as an endless "waiting." Sowell too is frank about the limitations of his data, but he uses what might be called an "ethnohistorical imagination" (with apologies to C. Wright Mills) to link the political troubles of Perdomo Neira's life with larger social issues, specifically the conflict between the church and scientific medicine that Sowell sees as one part of the Great Transformation to modernity in the northern Andes.

The book begins with a short introduction followed by four substantive chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the distinct approaches to sickness and healing in the northern Andes that came to be arranged in what the author calls the "colonial medical spectrum" (8). For Sowell, the social history of medicine in this region is particularly interesting because of the faith in "truth" that is required of quite different systems. Thus, he argues that the scientific medical system that emerged in the nineteenth century was only one part of a much broader cultural framework that had deep ties with the emerging modernist worldview.

In Chapter 2, Sowell introduces a character who serves as a counterpoint to the healer Perdomo Neira: a scientifically trained physician named Antonio Vargas Reyes. Vargas Reyes helped to move state- and elite-sponsored medical institutions away from old humorally based approaches and toward an understanding of illness derived from anatomical studies of cadavers. He also lobbied strongly to outlaw popular healers like Perdomo Neira as "charlatans" and so set the scene for a series of political conflicts over "truth," "reason," and "faith."

Chapter 3 discusses Miguel Perdomo Neira himself. Perdomo Neira was a staunch defender of the church who earned enough money through his curing to become a wealthy landowner. He named his hacienda San Juan de Dios, after the Catholic healing order of Colombia. Later in his life he was treated as a kind of living saint whose curing was surrounded with the pageantry of a religious festival. Indeed, these festivals seem at times to have been specifically...