Abstract
The first time I met a Nahua healer in Mexico was inside a public hospital. A woman came to the hospital’s traditional medicine clinic asking anxiously whether someone could cure her child of susto (Spanish: “fright”).1 Known as nemouhtil in Nahuatl, the lingua franca of the Aztec Empire2 and the language of approximately 1.4 million people in Mexico today, susto is considered a potentially deadly illness in which an animating component of the life force has been separated from the body.3 While people in Mexico have long sought healing for this illness—which afflicts most often children but also men and women of all ages—many physicians consider this malady a cultural fiction. At this hospital however, the staff member understood the woman’s request and sent her immediately to a healer who could attend to the child.
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Notes
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© 2015 Michal Jan Rozbicki
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Hale-Gallardo, J. (2015). Theorizing Interculturality in Healthcare: A Case from a Rural Indigenous Hospital in Mexico. In: Rozbicki, M.J. (eds) Perspectives on Interculturality. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484390_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484390_11
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