Medicine, Midwifery, and the Law

A body of nearly ninety criminal trials for abortion and infanticide in nineteenth-century Yucatán reveal some contradictory traits. On one hand, the testimony that licensed physicians provided to courts about the nature of the medicines that midwives and boticarios supplied to pregnant Mayan women was surprisingly respectful and supportive of these unlicensed health practitioners. The cases reveal both the ongoing practice of Mayan medicinal and botanical knowledge in obstetrical health at the close of the nineteenth century and, despite public rhetoric to the contrary, individual doctors’ tolerance of, or accommodation to, such practices. On the other hand, the local judges who tried these cases displayed much less accommodation to Mayan defendants, reflecting the pronounced Mayan and non-Mayan social and political tensions that characterized the era of the peninsula’s Caste War.