Medicine, health and society: History of medicine in Venezuela: colonial age by Ricardo Archila

Abstract

A critical review of the work of the physician and historian Ricardo Archila, History of Medicine in Venezuela: Colonial Era, is made. To do this, the health and disease situation in the northern region of South America, which would become a national unit from the eighteenth century, is described. Medicine in a broad sense was conceived in that period as a social response to the situation of health and disease, and in a strict sense, it was conceived in a social institutional dimension with concrete expressions such as the figures of qualified doctors (Latinists) and Romancists, as well as other magico-religious medical practices combined with popular traditions. Archila addresses the development of the dynamics of the practice of medicine in the colonial period that covers the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

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