The Gray Zones of Medicine

Diego Armus and Pablo Gómez curated a great collection of essays. . . . The chapters’ short length, vignette style, and focus on ordinary people within broader historical contexts also makes these chapters excellent resources for teaching about the history of health and medicine and the experiences of people that defy easy categorization in Latin America.

* Latin Americanist *

The Gray Zones of Medicine not only provides a remarkable and cohesive set of biographies of Latin American healers, ranging from the colonial period to today, the Caribbean to the Southern Cone, but also examines the fraught relationship between these male and female practitioners with the official, licensed world of medicine.

-- Charles F. Walker, University of California, Davis

The Gray Zones of Medicine makes a landmark contribution to decolonizing and decentering the field of the history of medicine. Turning away from categories such as ‘Western medicine’ and ‘popular versus learned medicine,’ the volume explores the complexity of medicine within the context of healers’ own lives and communities. Contributors do not seek to measure how Latin American medicine compared with, or diverged from, so-called Western biomedicine. Instead, they present a rich narrative of how healers moved, worked, and lived within their own worlds—that is, within the ‘gray zones of medicine.’

-- Elizabeth O’Brien, Johns Hopkins University

An interesting, original and well-researched work on the various facets of unconventional medicine in Latin America.

* Bulletin of Spanish Studies *

This volume contributes significantly to the region’s historiography of health and medicine by shedding light on the “gray zones” – spaces where different medical traditions overlap, challenge, and adapt to one another.

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