Medical Imagery and Fragmentation by Ramírez Dora Alicia;

Author:Ramírez, Dora Alicia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 4

A Gift from God

Religion and Science in María Cristina Mena’s Short Fiction

In A Doctor’s Dilemma: Preface on Doctors (1909), Bernard Shaw wrote, “All that can be said for medical popularity is that until there is a practicable alternative to blind trust in the doctor, the truth about the doctor is so terrible that we dare not face it” (6). Shaw’s words, written in 1909, illustrate the distrust that many individuals had of the medical establishment. At the beginning of the twentieth century, two ideas were taking root because of this distrust in the medical establishment. The first was the belief that science was a form of magic; and second, that science was a gift from God—thus giving credence to the writings of Maria Cristina Mena in that she was able to both make the differentiation and show the connections between science and that of religion, as well as how race and gender intersected these perspectives.

Modernity and industrialism took on different forms on the border of Mexico and the United States. Science, medicine, and religion were complicated by the contrasting and at times clashing belief systems of two different cultures. This chapter moves deeper into the modernist period and focuses on three of Mena’s early short stories including, “The Vine-Leaf” (December 1914), “The Sorcerer and General Bisco” (April 1915), “Marriage by Miracle” (March 1916), and her subsequent children’s novel, The Two Eagles (1943). These stories focus on the relationship between the indigenous population of Mexico and Western doctors and scientists. In these narratives, Mena examines how reason and magic/superstition are drawn together—pulled together by a sense of humanity. She also focuses on the plastic surgery, or as labeled at the time, “beauty surgery” treatments that upper-class Mexican women were being succumbed to with their presumed consent as a way to enter the modernized world and as a way to question the religious and devout modes of marriage and sexuality that upper-class Mexican women were bound to obey.

Mena’s writing works well to intersect race and class into the conflict between religion and science. In “Facial Uplift: Plastic Surgery, Cosmetics and the Retailing of Whiteness in the Work of Maria Cristina Mena,” Kyla Schuller wrote, “Many white reformers and people of color held onto the belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics as a promising blueprint for uplift and saw cosmetics as a tool for achieving beauty—and therefore, racial fitness—by enabling users to consciously direct the aesthetics of their evolution” (2009, 86). Many of the women who chose beauty surgery and the many more who bought and used cosmetics were buying into an economic market that was homogenizing Western beauty. Thus, the aesthetics of the body are an important element to consider as beauty surgery became more and more popular in both Mexico and the United States at the turn of the century.

Mena’s short stories were written during World War I, a time period in which plastic surgery was growing. Plastic surgery obtained a boost, or was an outcome of the needs exemplified during the war, such as facial reconstruction, including rhinoplasty.

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