Cold or spirits? Choice and ambiguity in Morocco's pluralistic medical system

Abstract

The two medical traditions which make up Arabic medical science remain as separate but complementary elements of Morocco's present pluralistic system. Prophetic medicine is concerned with spirit aetiologies, and Galenic humoral medicine with environmental factors. At their interface, an ambiguous group of illnesses refers to either system for their explanation and treatment, and analysis of their ambiguity demonstrates a profound syncretism between the systems around the concept of illness from contamination by cold or spirits. The illnesses are mostly chronic organic impairment of the senses, locomotion and fertility for which there is little effective treatment, and the Moroccan response to them, by drawing explicit symbols from two areas of shared experience—environmental cold as a pathogenic agent of the ecological domain, and spirit encounter as a feature of the neurotic domain—into the implicit understanding of their symptoms and signs, relates the private experience of organic illness to shared social categories in a way that may have value from the biomedical viewpoint.