Mystique, holy herbs and solidarity: Memory of non-medical care of leprosy in Agua de dios

Abstract

Introduction: The social representation of leprosy as a disease from the past, its local character that circumscribes it to the sanatoria, and the scarce contact of health workers with it suggest that the knowledge about its care has circulated between generations more or less confined. This confined knowledge, which incorporates not only biomedical knowledge but also expressions in knowledge, beliefs, practices, stories, the actors that construct and recreate them and their complex relationship with the dynamics of insertion in the territory in a living heritage, deserves to be narrated. Development: We begin by understanding the memory of the non-medical care of leprosy in Agua de Dios, through an ethnographic study, whose results allow us to propose two expressions of these. The first one, involving the non-medical health agents (especially nurses) and its relationship with care subjects, showed that this demands particular dispositions from the subjects as listening ability, observation, patience, and transcendence, accompanied by daily positioning and negotiation in the territory. The second is the care alternatives mediated by other agents with authorized knowledge that group a wide pharmacopeia related to the use of medicinal plants; references to healers and solidarity practices of mentoring between patients and relationships of their well-being with the environment. Conclusions: All these expressions of care challenge the discourses and canonical practices of biomedicine around this disease.