Healing Like Our Ancestors

Offering a provocative new perspective, this book examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Nahua healers in Central Mexico and how their practices have been misconstrued and misunderstood in colonial records. Historian Edward Anthony Polanco draws from diverse colonial primary sources, largely in Spanish and Nahuatl (the ancestral Nahua language), to explore how Spanish settlers framed Nahua titiçih (healing specialists), their knowledge, and their practices within a Western complex. Polanco argues for the usage of Indigenous terms when discussing Indigenous concepts, and arms the reader with the Nahuatl words to discuss central Mexican Nahua healing.