Curarse en Salud. Las medicinas como sistemas de transacciones

Abstract

This work researches the ways of managing the health-illness-caring process in ten villages in the North of Teruel with a population of 7,000 all together. We are all concerned about what happens when someone of their inhabitants get sick, taking for granted that it is either the family or the nearest social circle which must foot the first intervention, wondering which specialist consultants would be the suitable to go in case their own knowledges failed. Strategies arisen within patients, doctors and folk healers are studied to set up the connections among the following medical patterns they represent: Selfcaring Pattern, Hegemonic Medical one and Alternative Subordinated one. We may assume that illnesses and their treatments cannot be explained by biological conditionings, but also understanding the socioculturals factors as co-determinants of the medical assistance conditions. We are to set three crucial axes: the social agents viewpoint, the representations and practising system and the related viewpoint, the latter sought the help of the Hegemony and Subalternity concepts. To deal with objectively, other two items are checked out accuretely: Graciousness and Symbolic Efficacy, which are being applied to a methodology that includes the looking over the historical data, a participant observation, formal interviews and informal conversations. The legitimation devices, the cultural shaping and the importance of the settling infrastructure are studied to know both the meaning of the public health services and the quackery practice. The text has been divided into eight chapters: The first of them contains a concise checking of the medical anthropology in which this study is taking in, as well as the theoretical and conceptual setting, the applied methodology and the hypotheses. The second chapter outlines briefly the historical and social context and finishes off with the epidemiological features. The third and fourth chapters -taking them into account as a second section- work out the constituent process of the representations and practising until the opening of the Health Centre. The third section consists of the fifth, sixth and the seventh chapters, which explain the medical representations and the practising just as they are working nowadays. The former second section and the latter third section contains the main ethnographic body within partial analytic reflections. Throughout the four section, its only one chapter shows the analysis of the relations system. The text ends up with the conclusions and the referenced bibliography. Thus, this has been the way of making an ethnographic report, exhibited as chronicles and biographical features, which run to the understanding of how the historical constitution of either fatalistic, traditionalist, sceptical or eclectic minds is made and how it is dialectically set to the medicalization proceeding, explaining what the roll of the quackery is through the whole process. The theoretical elements involved are bound to blend in accordance with the development of the therapeutics itineraries description and the welfare work process, down to the get to the situation analysis, which is displayed as a system of ideological, political, cultural and economical transactions among all over the taking-in-account agents.