Profs & Pints Baltimore: Maya Medicine
Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Maya Medicine,” on the history and mysteries surrounding the healing practices of Guatemala’s Indigenous people, with David Carey Jr., professor of history at Loyola University Maryland and author of Health in the Highlands: Indigenous and Scientific Medicine in Guatemala and Ecuador.
Mayas, the original inhabitants of Central America, have long been experts in healing. But the relationship between their healers and outside scientists is a complicated one.
Explore the history of these practices and what is being learned about them with Professor David Carey Jr., who has done scholarly work in Guatemala for more than 30 years and learned the Mayan language Kaqchikel to conduct archival and oral history research there.
He’ll discuss accounts in ancient pre-Hispanic texts of medicinal plants, practices, and healers, and he’ll describe how healers, midwives, bonesetters, and others involved in tending to human health passed knowledge across generations.
We’ll look at how the first European arrivals to the Americas and their descendants have both benefitted from as well as suppressed Mayan healing practices. The European colonists of the 17th century exported back home knowledge of Indigenous treatments and medicines such as quinine for malaria. Nevertheless, doctors in both the colonial and postcolonial eras seemed threatened enough by Indigenous healers’ knowledge and practices to marginalize them and urge governments to outlaw them.
The relationship between scientific medicine and Indigenous healing has remained complicated in Guatemala over the past two centuries. Indigenous medicine practitioners often operate alongside doctors and nurses, and Indigenous healers have been credited for advancements such as a cancer cure derived from dried snake heads.
The talk will conclude with a look at a Guatemalan health alliance that provides biomedical and Indigenous healthcare in Indigenous languages. We’ll consider how it might provide a model for improving healthcare equity. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk starts at 6:30.)
