Medicina mestiça: saberes e práticas curativas nas minas setecentistas

Abstract

This study intends to investigate how the healing practices had been processed in the mineiro Eighteenth Century and how was constituted the medicine used by a plural and diversified society, where the cultural exchanges were in constant usage. Beginning with the analysis of manuscript prescriptions signed by surgeons and other sources related to the theme, the research permitted to identify the mestizages occurred in the universe of the cure and the agents who employed them. The result of that investigation aims at the installation of a mestizo medicine in which the transit of nature and healing knowledge among the four parts of the world, its appropriation and the new meanings given to them by different persons of that society were very important to the consolidation of the Healing Art in the Eighteenth Century Minas and to the role of those who, in a licit manner or on the fringes of law, practiced it in the same context.