"Traditional American medicine: a linguistic and ethnological treasure" by Victoria Domínguez Rodríguez

Doctor from the ULPGC and member of IATEXT, Victoria Domínguez Rodríguez ha  recently published in The Conversation: “Traditional American Medicine: A Linguistic and Ethnological Treasure”.

In this article Domínguez bases his article on AMERLEX-Database , “an online database open to the public whose main objective is to systematically gather the Amerindian voices and voices from Spain (Hispanisms) present in Spanish and English works of the 16th and 17th centuries.” Currently, this database has 558 words corresponding to the lexical field “plants and flora”, of which 105 have a description of their therapeutic usefulness or pharmaceutical form.

In this article we review words that have survived from the indigenous American populations to designate plants and the healing uses attributed to them, among which the tacajamaca stands out, the Nahuatl term that designates a tree whose resin Caraña (an Antillean Indian) was applied to the umbilical region of the woman, which acted as a painkiller for conditions of the external female reproductive system, or guayacan, also an Antillean Indian, which supposedly cured syphilis.

Full article in The Conversation.

The Conversation Spain is the main channel for disseminating knowledge that emanates from universities. The ULPGC joined this platform in February 2020, as sponsored by the CRUE-Spanish Universities.

The Conversation has editions in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Indonesia and Africa, in addition to the Spanish edition, which was launched in the summer of 2018 and in just over a year It has achieved more than 20 million readings thanks to the republication of the articles in 170 media outlets. All articles published in The Conversation can be republished, in print or digital form, without being edited, ensuring that it is attributed to its author, its reference institution (university or research center), and mentioning that the article was originally published on the platform.