Pluralism in Practice: What Latin American Hospital Histories Can Contribute to Histories of Medicine
By the twentieth century, hospitals in Latin America were cornerstones and contact zones of nation building and healing. In Guatemala and Ecuador, indígenas (Indigenous people) struggled to carve out their place in the nation. Latin American hospitals hosted a wide range of therapies. Early twentieth-century Ecuadorian hospitals endorsed curanderos (healers), while Guatemalan hospitals regularly employed midwives. Sometimes overseen by Catholic nuns, hybrid hospital care was both a product and reflection of the imperfect, capricious, and partial processes that marked modernization’s and scientific medicine’s evolution in postcolonial nations with large Indigenous populations such as Guatemala and Ecuador. Highlighting the contributions and experiences of Indigenous people, healers, and midwives and the Sisters of Charity reveals how hospitals and the care provided in them held multiple meanings and functioned in different ways for a variety of parties.