ABSTRACT
This chapter uses Mexican Inquisition documents and a gendered lens on medical history to study the case-and medical toolkit-of Isabel Hernández, a seventeenth-century mestiza (indigenous-Spanish) midwife who lived and practiced in central Mexico. Isabel’s case reveals that colonial Mexican midwifery was a “contact zone” (Pratt 1991): an important locus for the transmission, forging, and transmutation of hybrid understandings of medicine and the body. The contact zone, in Pratt’s formulation, was the place where, in uneven and power-laden but often surprising exchanges, colonial cultures (and knowledge) were forged. Despite the radical difference and, at times, mutual incomprehensibility of Iberian and Mesoamerican notions of embodiment, health, and medicine, and the considerable divide between translation and meaning in cultural and linguistic exchange (Bassett 2015), midwives and their clients bridged difference and shaped colonial understandings of childbirth, medicine, and the human body. This chapter thus contributes to recent scholarship on areas of dialogue and crosspollination between European and indigenous knowledge traditions (inter alia, Diel 2016; Ramos and Yannakakis 2014), but does so from a perspective centered on women and plebeian exchanges rather than on learned men.
