Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A man who practices folk medicine; an herb doctor.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A traditional Central American
healer
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a Mexican man who practices healing techniques inherited from the Mayans
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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A curandero is a white witch, who practices beneficial magic.
Ann Aguirre » Blog Archive » May You Live in Interesting Times. 2009
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The curandero was a large man with a smooth face and a deliberate manner.
One River Wade Davis 1996
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The curandero was a large man with a smooth face and a deliberate manner.
One River Wade Davis 1996
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60Today, the word "curandero" brings to mind images of a healer working in long-forgotten traditions, dispensing herbal remedies, and curing curious ailments such as "evil eye" and "susto" by way of magic and ritual.
Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico 2008
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Note 12: Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran, Medicina y magia: El proceso de aculturación en la estructura colonial (México: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1963); Neomí Quezada, Enfermedad y malefación, el curandero en el México colonial (México: UNAM, 1989). back
Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico 2008
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But the repertoire of the curandero did not belong exclusively to the realm of the supernatural; most healers combined these practices with the standard therapeutic techniques of the day, such as bloodletting, purging, bathing, and massage.
Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico 2008
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But in the day-to-day world of colonial medicine, a curandero was not so clearly or narrowly defined.
Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico 2008
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These peculiar objects could be sucked out — the curandero used his or her mouth to do this — of any part of a patient's body, but most common was from the navel or somewhere on the face. 94 The healing methods of the indigenous curandero, at least during the first hundred years of the colonial period, had changed very little since the days of their ancestors.
Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico 2008
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Note 85: Nóemi Quezada, Enfermedad y maleficio: el curandero in el México colonial (México: UNAM, 1989), p. 107; Ruiz de Alarcón, p. 7; see also Serge Gruzinski's comments on sources and methodology in The Conquest of Mexico, pp. 305 – 8. back
Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico 2008
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The novice could acquire all sorts of medical expertise empirically by working alongside the barber-surgeon, the partera, and the curandero.
Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word curandero
"There is the old village itself and its vestigial claims to "authenticity"; the church (relatively new as southwestern churches go, having replaced an older one in 1884); the 18-year-old upscale development to the west for contrast (and for an architectural tour of another nature; it's a good survey of imagined "Santa Fe style"); the movie set in the distance the curandero's "office" with its skull on a pole; what used to be here and there (scattered adobe ruins); the quite new community center and the brand new firehouse (partially built by community work parties); yard art; an extensive petroglyph site; the cloud shows and encompassing light on ranchlands and mountains; the (diminishing) biological diversity of the creek and bosque; the mouth-watering tamales at the Tienda Anaya; and, of course, the people."
On the Beaten Path by Lucy Lippard, pp 12-13
April 10, 2011