Conceptions of Health and Disease among Spanish-Americans

Abstract

This paper presents some conceptions of health and disease as perceived by Spanish-American villagers. An attempt is made to provide a framework which can be used to consider disease prevention, causation, diagnosis, treatment and the general health orientation of the SpanishAmericans. Emphasis is placed on the extra-human factors involved in these health conceptions and the suggestion is made that an important religious component is a central theme which must be taken into consideration when discussing etiological factors, preventive measures, diagnostic perceptions and therapeutic procedures as perceived by this population. Studies published in recent years have described in detail various aspects of perceptions and behavior related to health as perceived by Spanish-Americans1 and Mexican-Americans in the United States and related populations. Few of these studies have addressed themselves to the extra-human factors in the health and disease conceptions of these populations; and if these factors have been mentioned, they have been mentioned only in relation to specific attitudes, behavior, or situations, with no attempt to place the extra-human factors in broader perspective. It is this broader perspective that will be the main emphasis of the present report.2 In this paper an attempt will be made to describe some conceptions of health and disease as viewed by a typical Span? ish-American villager.3 It is hoped that this discussion may provide a 1 The term Spanish-American refers to that population whose ancestors settled in the Southwestem part of the United States in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries along the Rio Grande River valleys. In many in? stances this population still resides in relatively isolated villages in New Mexico and Southern Colorado. To the extent that the population has become acculturated and/or has moved to urban centers, the scheme developed here will not apply. 2 The author is indebted to Lyle Saunders and Sam Schulman who read an earlier draft of this paper and offered many critical comments. The author, nevertheless, accepts responsibility for the content of the paper. 3 The fieldwork on which most of the paper is based was done in a New Mexico village during the summer of 1959 while the author was employed on a project supported by research grant RG-5615 of the National Institutes of Health.