Scenes of Healing: Mexico, Medicine, and the Nation Form

This dissertation explores healing as a struggle between regimes of knowledge. It interrogates Mexican narratives of healing and disease from the late nineteenth century to the late seventies. It engages with a fundamental question: how has thinking about healing changed over time? By healing, I refer to the mediated passage from illness to wellness and analyze narrative depictions of this process. These depictions often bring together a patient and a healer. I understand the patient as a person, population, inanimate object, or living being mentally, physically, or spiritually afflicted. This affliction could be an illness, trauma, or any malady the reader perceives as part of the plot or scene. I understand the healer as a person, object, or animal facilitating the patient’s path from illness to wellness. What is at stake in this analysis is a critical understanding of a process essential to everyone’s survival.