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.

本论文将疗愈视作不同知识体制之间的博弈并展开研究。本文针对19世纪末至20世纪70年代末的墨西哥疗愈与疾病叙事展开探析，提出一项核心根本问题：疗愈认知随时间推移发生了怎样的演变？本文所指的疗愈，是从患病至康复的中介性过渡过程，并将对该过程的叙事性呈现展开分析。这类叙事呈现通常会将病患与疗愈者作为核心要素。本文所界定的病患，指遭受精神、躯体或灵性层面苦痛的个体、群体、无生命物体，抑或是任何活的生命体；此类苦痛可以是疾病、创伤，或是读者可感知为情节或场景组成部分的任何病症。本文所界定的疗愈者，指助力病患从患病状态走向康复的个体、物体或动物。本分析的核心关切，在于对这一关乎全人类生存的关键过程形成批判性认知。