Forbidden Passages by Karoline P. Cook

Author:Karoline P. Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2019-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

SUPERNATURAL REMEDIES FOR ILLNESS: MORISCO HEALERS

While official channels such as the Protomedicato were increasingly trying to regulate who could become a licensed physician in both Spain and Spanish America, residents of the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru complained of the scarcity of doctors and the high cost of summoning them to their sickbed. Unregulated healers were much more attractive, being less expensive and more amenable to including in their cures religious elements that were also thought to influence individual bodies and health. Each community had slightly different prayers and figures to whom they appealed to cure illnesses, but over time they borrowed from each other.92

While old Christians may have doubted curanderos who failed to incorporate a proper dose of Catholic piety in their remedies, Moriscos in Spanish America may have sought the aid of healers whose cures they found familiar. For some, this created the opportunity to avoid the spiritual remedies forwarded by Catholic priests, surrounding sacraments such as the Eucharist.93 For others, the Christian-Muslim polemics, present in local knowledge, spurred denunciations even concerning a patient’s behavior on the sickbed. In this context, the sickbed came to be a place in which old Christians and Moriscos associated, at times sharing their expertise in medicine and at others encountering conflict.94 In 1624, when Gregorio Faxardo was ill in his hacienda of Santa Catalina near Sombrerete, in New Spain, he was asked to confess, take last rites, and pray for God’s mercy for his sins. According to scandalized witnesses, “In no way did he appear … to do such a thing, or incline himself toward such acknowledgment that he should have as a Christian.”95 Finally, Faxardo’s doctor, Captain Diego de Bañuelos, summoned Friar Andrés de León to administer the sacraments to Faxardo, but that “before doing so, he [Faxardo] released a thousand oaths.”96 One of the witnesses, Miguel Sánchez Montión, took Faxardo to be a “bad Christian” because of his blasphemies, and because he never saw him “pray outside the church, and [when he was] in it [it was] with poor example and little veneration.”97 Sánchez Montión also noted that once when Bañuelos was bleeding him, Faxardo exclaimed, “this blood is Muslim, and on another occasion, many days later, he declared … that his lineage and relatives … descended from the Muslim kings of Granada.”98 If true, Faxardo’s claim to noble status and descent from prominent Granadan Muslim families is worth considering. It is interesting that Sánchez Montión chose to repeat this to inquisitors, as in Spain the claim to descent from the Granadan and Moroccan nobility brought with it a series of economic privileges and exemptions from the restrictions placed on the majority of the Morisco population.99 The claim would have its echoes in those of the indigenous nobility in New Spain and Peru, who assumed privileges under Spanish rule by highlighting their noble lineage predating Spanish arrival, and participation in the early conquests. Could this have been Faxardo’s attempt to defend himself against allegations of blasphemy?

Frustrated by the doctor

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