ABSTRACT
The dual task of the endeavor has to elucidate how a system of knowledge, specifically biomedicine, developed in one society becomes translated in another, and how patients respond to its treatment. The history of biomedicine and its practice and explores the multifacetes aspects of Mexican existence in which sickness is playes out. Diagnostic assessments employ international nosologies and nomenclatures. Mexican cultural etiological understandings encompass individual existential experiences that become especially manifested in typical presenting symptoms. The doctor's sense of sickness, reinforced by patients' understandings, carries a moral baggage, and is roots in a cultural space. The result of the doctor's negotiated efforts reduces extrasomatic experience to biomedical categories such as the nervous system, psychosomatic problems, or stress. The advances have made by biomedicine in dealing with complex and life–threatening conditions, but on a day– to–day level the often fail to eliminate or even alleviate a patient's sickness.
