History of Latin American Dermatology

E. SILVA-LIZAMA, P. H. URQUIZU, P. GREENBERG, S. DE LEÓNTheir warlike life gave them a special knowledge of wounds; they classified them in atopographical manner taking into account their depth, what caused them and their complications.Each disease was treated with herbs and the treatment was carried out byspecialists. There were specialists in bites owing to the large amount of snakes and insects.The knew the articulations of the body, which were sometimes represented in figurines(there is a part of the Popol Vuh that refers to the setting of bones). FriarBartolomé de las Casas mentioned herbalists, called quamanel which, translated, means“healer.” Their physicians probably carried out some basic type of trial-and-error researchobserving the effects of plants on the diverse pathologies.At the moment of childbirth, the pregnant woman confessed her sins, and the midwifedrew her own blood and sprayed it while making invocations and carrying out theceremony to facilitate the delivery.Surgery wasn’t as well developed as herbal medicine; nevertheless, their surgeonswere capable of pulling teeth and carrying out tooth mutilations, making prostheses, removingforeign bodies, draining abscesses, healing wounds, and carrying out bloodletting,circumcisions, skull trepanning and eye healing.According to the chroniclers, the Indians’ therapeutic arsenal was efficient, superiorFigures:12. Harelip13. Rhinophyma14. Abdominal tumorto that of the physicians and surgeons who arrived in the sixteenth century. They hadpurges, diuretics, coagulants, emetics, sedatives, etc.The main sanitary habits were their diet and baths. Their food intake was balanced;corn was the main foodstuff and they also employed vegetables and venison, as well asfish. They prepared fermented beverages on the basis of fruit such as the dwarf ambarella(jocote).The Mayans used steam baths. The Temazcal baths constituted special rites: marriedcouples bathed together; pregnant women bathed in the last months of pregnancy andthe unmarried bathed alone. These baths were a little over one meter high, and hadstone walls and a wooden floor covered with mud. Inside were stones that were heatedand then wetted with water to produce steam. Their protector was the goddess Temazcalteci.Medicinal waters were also used, such as sulfurous ones to cure cramps, body aches,intestinal infections and rheumatism; they believed that thermal waters held curativepowers. In the Europe of the sixteenth century it wasn’t customary to take frequentbaths. Captain Juan de Estrada (1579) mentions in one of his writings that “they had thehabit of bathing in rivers and continue to do so.” The Spanish chronicler Fuentes yGuzmán wrote that the Indians employed baths to treat fevers, tumors (syphilis) andother ills 4, 5 (Table 1).228