In Healing with Herbs and Rituals, Cheo Torres provides readers with perhaps the most concise and yet comprehensive introduction to herbalism and curing in Mexican-American communities. In this slim and at times uneven treatment of a prodigious topic, Torres adroitly provides just enough initiatory matter to charm the reader without reducing the topics of curanderismo, folk healers, and green medicine to coffee table banalities. While the studied practitioner will continue to consult such materia medica as The German Commission E Monographs or the inestimable Weiss’s Herbal Medicine, Torres’ book has a clear place in the literature, particularly as a study of ethnic folk practice that brings both oral and performative generational knowledge into written form.
Because book reviewers must evaluate texts according to the authors’ stated intentions, I point out that Torres clearly articulates that his goals are neither academic nor trivial (71). He hits the right tone by striking directly in the middle. Readers get a lot of a little: a brief history of curanderismo, the rituals of curing, folk beliefs, biographical snippets of famous curanderos, herbal knowledge as a Latino-Aztecan hybrid, preparing herbs, herbalist terms, and “further reading” lists. This breadth of topics is impressive, even if the depth is prudently cursory. Had Torres been writing for academics, he would have provided details of his research. Claims of healing are “documented” by unnamed sociologists and “presumed true accounts,” but Torres does not share with us any methodology for validating his or their truth claims. I do not mean these as criticisms since Torres is not interested in that type of intellectualism. In fact, we might understand Torres as offering an Other epistemology.
Just as Folklore often provides counter-narratives to official History, Torres makes the case not only that alternative healing practices effectively treat human ailments, but also that these forms of treatment account for the actual lived life of community members, including their differences in languages, values, and religiosities. Working among his own social class, Torres embodies the sort of organic intellectualism vital to disrupting dominant ideologies of wellness that continue serving the ruling class of pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies. But my Gramscian interpretation is exactly the dialogue Torres avoids; academic speak serves academics. Throughout the nineteen small chapters, Torres draws upon Mexican collective memory, rather than solely scholarly sources, because his archive is the dialogically-embodied one built by relatives talking about what really works. He is conveying the merits of historically poor people’s medicines, but not to the intelligentsia. Bridging this local knowledge with government policy in Chapter Ten, Torres considers how curanderismo might structurally be incorporated into a national health care system. The book subtly foregrounds a telling comparison between an individual’s relationship to FDA-sanctioned, laboratory-tested, capsuled remedies and the embodied dialogue between plants, caregivers, and a person seeking community, physical, and religio-psychological balance. And while his hopes for widespread acceptance of “green medicine” might be considered dated by holistic health insiders (naturopathic doctors already write prescriptions, offer primary health care, and perform surgery in some U.S. states), Torres makes an important point well, one which in fact deserves to be repeated: complementary health practices are born from the grounded experiences of individuals and can nourish communities everywhere.
As to my criticisms, I am left with the impression that the unevenness of the book comes from overlapping oversights on the part of Torres, Sawyer and UNM Press. How else can we explain omissions in content, gaps in indexing, and what seems a lack of attention to layout and imaging? The Chinaberry tree so central to one of the healers is left unmentioned in either the Glossary of Herbs or the Index (40). The Pirul tree is supposedly important to Niño Fidencio’s pilgrims, but Torres offers no explanation of this particular tree’s significance (45). Torres tells us that saffron is a remedy used by curanderos, but fails to tell us how, when, or why (95). The editing also lacks an expected consistency, particularly when the intention seems clearly to provide options for healing. We are told that arnica will help with “minor dermatological disorders” (120), without any specificity of which disorders. Similarly too general is the claim that the centaury plant helps to induce weight loss when taken before bed, but seemingly only when combined with unnamed “other plants” (125). And although the book says that dandelion will make an “excellent toilet water,” for the life of me I can’t figure out why I would want it to. Lastly, in terms of UNM Press’ responsibility to produce a useful and appealing book, readers are bound to wonder why such a lovely cover surrounds such odd pictures. Chamomile and mint are sketched nicely enough, but are featured nowhere near Torres’ description of them. Drawings of ojo de venados (“deer eye” amulets), worry dolls, bottles of medicine, regal Aztec men, and stereotypical conquistadors are provided, entirely without discussion in the text and often oddly placed in, at best, tangentially related sections. Much ado is made about the shrines of Don Pedrito Jaramillo, yet no sketches or photos are included. Fortunately, these drawbacks are minor, mostly issues of editing or formatting, and they distract little from the quality of the book’s content.
To be sure, this book offers much to scholars of folklore, not solely due to the subject matter’s slippery place between objective science and subjective experience. The Houghton Mifflin online dictionary, we might note, defines “curanderismo” first as “folk medicine” and secondarily as “charlatanismo, or quackery.” And although Torres flirts with these larger, and I think productive, debates by noting that belief also plays a sure role in “formal medicine” (40), he writes neither to excuse nor defend. The strength of this book, rather, is the sureness of the prose and its documentation of the continued reliance upon curanderismo by so many people across time and space. Cheo Torres has accomplished no small feat bringing together these micro and macro stories of curanderismo in this humble yet powerful book.
Works Cited
Blumenthal, Mark, Werner R. Busse and Bundesinstitut fur Arzneimittel und Medizinprodukte, Eds. The Complete German Commission E Monographs: Therapeutic Guide to Herbal Medicines. Austin: American Botanical Council. 1998, 1999.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Eds. London: Lawrence and Wishart. 1971.
Weiss, Rudolf F. Weiss’s Herbal Medicine, Classic Edition. A. R. Meuss, Trans. New York: Thieme Medical Publishers. 2001.
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[Review length: 1061 words • Review posted on March 29, 2007]