Bringing Traditional Medicine into the Health Humanities Classroom with Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s “Remedies”

Abstract

In this essay, we recommend Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short story “Remedies” (2019) for inclusion on health humanities syllabi based on our experiences teaching it at two undergraduate institutions. The story is drawn from Sabrina & Corina, Fajardo-Anstine’s award-winning book of short stories about Chicana and Indigenous women in Colorado, but is available for free online, making it highly accessible for students. “Remedies” is narrated by Clarisa, who turns to her great-grandmother Estrella for the traditional knowledge that ultimately cures her family’s recurrent outbreaks of lice. As a health narrative that centers familial and cultural healing practices, “Remedies” offers a much needed counterpart to the biomedical frameworks that tend to dominate health humanities syllabi and curricula. At the same time that it illuminates the physical and emotional efficacy of such practices, “Remedies” rejects a binary that pits them against biomedicine, offering a complex portrait of how various members of a family integrate traditional and biomedical approaches to health. We discuss how themes related to familial and cultural healing practices are developed in the story and introduce our approach to initiating productive conversations about the relationship between traditional healing and biomedicine in our classrooms.