Repository | Book | Chapter

The first time I met a Nahua healer in Mexico was inside a public hospital. A woman came to the hospital's traditional medicine clinic asking anxiously whether someone could cure her child of susto (Spanish: "fright").¹ Known as nemouhtil in Nahuatl, the lingua franca of the Aztec Empire² and the language of approximately 1.4 million people in Mexico today, susto is considered a potentially deadly illness in which an animating component of the life force has been separated from the body.³ While people in Mexico have long sought healing for this illness—which afflicts most often children but also men and women of all ages—many physicians consider this malady a cultural fiction. At this hospital however, the staff member understood the woman's request and sent her immediately to a healer who could attend to the child.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137484390_11

Full citation: