Inquisitor as Physician: Friars, Inquisitors, Women, and Medical Knowledge in Early Colonial New Spain (1530–1650)

Abstract

New Spain was the site not only of one of the largest-scale missionary enterprises in Christian history, but also of a prolonged encounter among diverse medical traditions of Mesoamerican, African, and European origin in which male missionaries were central. Given the paucity of licensed physicians in the colony, religious involvement in medical practice remained significant throughout the colonial period. This paper considers the confluence of religion and medicine in the encounters that friars and inquisitors had with women, arguing that in these encounters, missionaries and inquisitors participated in the translation, circulation, and creation of medical knowledge and positioned themselves as both theological and medical authorities, as proponents and translators of Galenic medical theory, and as “confessor-physicians” rather than “confessor-judges.” Women thus played a crucial interlocutory role in the articulation of a colonial religio-medical regime whose primary framers were not physicians, but clergymen.