Martha Few (University of Arizona)
Paper Title: Anti-Typhus Campaigns and the Ritual Landscapes of Maya Medicine in Colonial
Guatemala, 1796-1806
Typhus proved a frustrating illness to treat from the perspective of colonial medicine in the Audiencia
of Guatemala, where authorities there had been unable to cure it or even to stop its spread since it
had first appeared in the tributary indigenous towns of the Kuchumatán Mountains in the fall of 1796.
Nor were doctors and colonial medical campaigns there able to make much headway treating the
disease during the next decade, as typhus continued to emerge and re-emerge in numerous towns
across the northern and western highlands through the winter of 1806. In this context of lack of a cure
or successful typhus treatment, political and medical authorities tended to blame Mayas themselves
for spreading the illness, and in the process more forcefully delineated the boundaries between
colonial and indigenous medicine in discourses and in treatment guidelines. As a result, documents
generated by anti-epidemic campaigns undertaken against diseases that did not yet have a cure,
including typhus, provide important clues to Mesoamerican medical-ritual cultures and treatments,
especially when one examines closely how epidemic doctors and others treating the sick complained
about Maya medical practices that they felt encouraged the spread of typhus.
Indeed, this process of hardening the boundaries between colonial and Mesoamerican
medicine in discourse and in anti-epidemic campaigns in the field reveals fascinating details of vibrant
Mesoamerican medical cultures active in the late colonial period, along with the ritual specialists,
treatments, regional pharmacopeias, and sacred spaces used to combat and mediate illness and
epidemic disease in general and typhus in particular. Highland Maya ritual specialists and their
patients at times practiced Mesoamerican medicine to treat epidemic diseases separately from
prescribed colonial medical treatments, and other times did so in conjunction with them where they
saw clear health results or strategic benefits, a process repeated across epidemic-inflicted towns. As
a result, this study works to challenge depictions in colonial sources and in the contemporary
historiography that have tended downplay, ignore, or discount indigenous medicine within
Enlightenment era histories of colonial medical and scientific cultures in Latin America.
Biography: Martha Few is associate professor of history at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She is
author of Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial
Guatemala (University of Texas Press, 2002) and, with Zeb Tortorici, Centering Animals in Latin
American History (in press at Duke University Press, forthcoming May 2013). She also has a
forthcoming book, All of Humanity: Indigenous Medicine and Colonial Public Health Campaigns in
Enlightenment Central America. In addition to publishing articles in such journals as Ethnohistory,
Mesoamérica, and British Journal for the History of Science, she has served on the editorial board of
Ethnohistory from 2007-2009.