Indigenous Medicine and Nation-Building

This chapter discusses the role of Andean culture in Peruvian physician Hermilio Valdizán’s project of creating and disseminating a national medical history in the early twentieth century. Valdizán’s interest in indigenous medicine and its healing treatments emerged as a critique of certain European intellectuals and physicians who suggested that people in the Americas were intrinsically inferior and unhealthy. Through the use of medical literature, crónicas de indias, literary fiction, newspapers, dictionaries, and pre-colonial pottery, Valdizán defended indigenous peoples’ intellectual capability, emphasizing how they categorized mental illnesses and their treatments. His ground-breaking research was the first attempt to insert traditional Andean medicine into the national history of medicine and mental health.