Medicinal Mountains and Curative Climates: How Physicians Made the Andes Sacred

Travel for health is an ancient practice, and the quest to visit places with salubrious weather has long inspired patients to travel.  As physicians and travelers historically constructed these distinct regions, landscapes, and climates through the lens of health, they simultaneously attached emotional, spiritual, and even sacred values to those places.  Scholars have written some about health travel to find "pure air" and rejuvenating weather in Europe, North America, and even parts of the British and French empires.  But the analysis of health resorts and climate therapy remains largely untouched in Latin America and the Caribbean, where residents and foreigners also flocked to regions they believed had salubrious climates, such as Jauja, Peru.  This paper examines how and why the Central Andes of Peru and its climate became healthful in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The region also became more than just a place to cure disease: the pure air could supposedly improve visitors' purity of health, mind, and spirit.  In this way, physicians who prescribed the healthful Andean climate played a key role in turning parts of Peru into a sacred landscape.  But this reconceptualization of the Peruvian Andes was a contested process.  It was embedded in scientific controversies and contradictions.  National and foreign physicians often disagreed.  Upper-class urban residents sought out these rural highland places to cure their ills while they classified the local populations as backward Indian peasants outside of civilization, in part because of their relationship with the land and its remote location.  Understanding these fascinating processes involves uncovering a host of interacting forces related to the making of sacred mountain spaces, as well as evolving histories of medical sciences, climate history, cultural constructions of national landscapes, nation-building agendas, societal perceptions of disease and health, and beliefs about treatment for tuberculosis and asthma.