The Hot and the Cold: Ills of Humans and Maize in Native Mexico

John Walker is a professor of Spanish studies at Queen’s University.

As a developed country, Mexico has a modern health system that is rooted
in the European tradition brought over by the Spanish colonizers and
improved over the centuries. The main point of this latest volume in the
interdisciplinary Anthropological Horizons series is that many of the
Indian ideas about heat and cold, and their effects on human and plant
life, continue to influence current medical theory and practice.

Written for specialists, this is an often-difficult book to digest. In
nine well-documented and at times dense chapters, the authors discuss
and challenge many previously held ideas about the humoral basis of
medicine brought over by the Spaniards in the 16th century, especially
with regard to the notion that hot/cold reasoning is a product of this
modern doctrine. Drawing on their field research in Sierra Santa Marta
in Southern Veracruz, the authors make interesting points about the
healing and health practices of the indigenous peoples—practices that
continue to exist alongside medicinal systems of Western origin.

A wealth of material in these chapters (solar life, birth,
lovesickness, fear of the dead, frights and soul-snatching, corn and
water, animal imagery) is based on folk tales and stories that connect
medicine and corn mythology. In exploring the links between
ethnomedicine, agriculture, and mythology, the authors broaden our
understanding of Indian life, attitudes, and, above all, health and
medicine.