Besides professed sick-tenders, zamba housekeepers or head-servants, some women in the middle and humbler ranks, such as manteras, chocolateras, tenderas, cigareras, picanteras, pulperas, changaneras,—that is, female shopkeepers, chocolate and cigar venders, with a subordinate gradation of publicans, &c.—are always ready to talk, with confounding fluency and volubility, without knowledge, concerning qualities and temperaments; and they display a natural acuteness of metaphysical capacity, with a truly peripatetic nicety of discrimination, when, in a moment of oratorical excitement, they assign to certain mixtures and drinks ideal measures and degrees of the elementary qualities. Women skilled in such mysteries, and omniscient charlatans, run over the various combinations of the cold and hot, dry and humid, and all their resulting modifications of temperature and temperament, with apparently unerring precision, and with a graduated exactness which no chemist in Europe, with every advantage of science and apparatus, can pretend to equal in his elaborate investigations into the qualities and elements of bodies either living or inanimate.
The particular temperament of the patient his intimate friends are supposed to know perfectly; and the doctor’s reply to any question that may be proposed to him on this subject will be considered, in many instances, as no bad test of his penetration and professional knowledge in other matters with which they do not presume to be themselves so well acquainted.
In conformity with such prevailing impressions, when nurses are to be selected for the children of delicate mothers, preference is given to the black women, as their blood and milk are believed to be cooler and more refreshing than the same fluids are in women of a different race. The Indian woman, on the other hand, is considered inferior to the negress as a nurse, because she is believed to be of a comparatively hot temperament and constitution. The effect of the quality of the nurse’s milk is conceived to influence the future temperament of the infant that hangs on her breast; and it is sometimes assigned as a reason why an individual is of an ardent temperament, that when a child he had been weaned, or deprived of the breast, by giving him wine,—se desteto con vino.
Colour is looked upon as an indication of constitutional temperament even in the lower animals. Thus, when one in town labours under hectic fever, or consumption, he is recommended to go to the country, and drink warm milk from a black cow, because it is allowed to be more cooling and febrifuge than the milk taken from a cow of any other colour.
In case of a rheumatic swelling of a joint,—the knee, for instance,—or some tumefaction in any of the glands, it is taken for granted, that, whatever other remedy be applied, the envelope for the limb or part affected must be of a medicinal colour, and consist of black wool, or something of a dark woollen texture. In short, so far has this general idea concerning the antiphlogistic nature of black been carried, that few natives dispute its accuracy: nor are we prepared to say that it may not have some foundation in fact and observation (though often laughed at by strangers as a puerile prejudice); for it is well known to scientific men, that the free radiation of heat is much influenced by the differences of colour in the radiating surfaces of bodies.
With respect to food and drink, the division into cold and hot is never overlooked.
A “traguito,” or little dram of Italia, a colourless brandy made on the coast, the old men consider as fresco, or cooling, when taken immediately after dinner; and when they take the “traguito,” which they do not every day, it will probably facilitate the digestion of the greasy food which they are commonly accustomed to eat, and in this manner deserve the name of a fresco. But, again, though at their entertainments they allow wine to be a safe and good drink after the “helados,” or ices, which they like exceedingly, still they use wine sparingly on other occasions, as they consider it too heating for general use. There are fruits after which the natives do not think it safe to drink either wine or spirits; of this sort is the short plantain, called “platano de guinea,” after which a mouthful of spirits would be considered quite poisonous. Foreigners do not seem to attend to this strict rule observed by the natives; nor is the violation of it, as far as we know, attended with any serious consequence to them.
Various kinds of fruit and vegetable juices, which are considered cool in their qualities, are not rarely most heating in their effects, according to the condition of the system when taken. The melon is in reputation for its cooling nature; but, though the impression made by it on our alimentary organs is at first very refreshing, the muleteer who journeys from the Cordillera to the coast, and has but once in his lifetime been attacked with a gastric tertian, in consequence of cooling his parched fauces by eating of the melon, can give a lively account of the internal heat, agitation, and oppression experienced by him on the occasion. There is no cooling fruit safer than the granadilla, which is most grateful and refreshing to the feverish patient, or thirsty traveller in the scorched and rock-bound ravines and narrow valleys of the interior, where this fruit is often abundant, as it is also on the coast in its proper season.
Fowls are reckoned to be infinitely cooler in their temperament than sheep or oxen, and their flesh is also considered as very safe and cooling; hence the almost universal use of the former, and prohibition or disuse of the latter, in the dietary of a delicate invalid. This distinction will appear still more strongly marked, when it is observed, that to prescribe beef-tea in any acute disease would be deemed an act of rashness and ignorance; but chicken-tea is held to be the most cooling of diluents, and very eligible in the most inflammatory diseases and in the warmest weather.