Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred
The scope of this pillar and how it differs from related guides
New Mexico curanderismo, folk healing & herbal medicine — book collecting books, including Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande (1947), are sought-after collectibles commanding. New Mexico has generated more published literature on traditional healing practices — curanderismo, herbolaria, partera midwifery, sobador massage healing — than any comparably sized American region, and the reason is straightforward: the state was home to one of the oldest continuously practiced folk healing systems in North America. The curanderismo of the upper Rio Grande Hispano communities has operated in unbroken continuity since the first Spanish colonial settlements of the late sixteenth century, absorbing Pueblo Indian botanical knowledge, African herbal traditions carried by enslaved and freed persons in the Spanish colonial system, and Moorish-Arabic medical theory transmitted through Spain. The result is a system of remarkable depth and resilience, and a print record of corresponding richness.
This pillar focuses specifically on the healing-practice tradition and its literature: how people actually got healed, who the healers were, what they used, what they believed, and what the system looked like from the inside. It is not the same as the New Mexico ethnobotany pillar, which covers the plant-use documentation tradition from the natural-science side — the cataloguing of species, the scientific identification of active compounds, the cross-cultural comparison of plant pharmacopoeia. Ethnobotany asks: which plants are used? The healing-practice literature asks: how is healing done, by whom, within what cosmological framework, through what social structures, and with what understanding of why illness happens in the first place? The overlap is substantial — Curtin’s Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande sits in both categories simultaneously — but the collecting profiles are distinct.
This pillar also differs from the existing Curanderismo & Folk Healing pillar, which covers the broader social and anthropological literature including Kiev’s psychiatric study, the Jaramillo and Cabeza de Baca women’s writing, the Penitente Brotherhood healing tradition, Marc Simmons on brujería, and Marta Weigle. This guide is narrower in one direction and broader in another: it focuses more tightly on the herbal medicine and healing-practice mechanics literature and extends beyond the strictly Hispano-tradition works to include the Southwest-regional herbal guides (Michael Moore, Stephen Buhner) that have made Southwestern plant medicine legible to a national audience of clinical herbalists and natural-medicine practitioners.
The canonical authors of this narrower literature are: Leonora Scott Muse Curtin (the 1947 WPA-era fieldwork), Eliseo Torres (the UNM curanderismo program's principal published voice), Robert Trotter and Juan Antonio Chavira (the definitive ethnographic account of curanderismo as a complete healing system), Bobette Perrone, H. Henrietta Stockel, and Victoria Krueger (comparative oral histories of women healers), Michael Moore (the most influential Southwestern herbalist of the twentieth century), Stephen Harrod Buhner (the spiritual-plant-medicine tradition), and Margarita Artschwager Kay (the pharmacognosy and medical-anthropology synthesis). Together, these eight names — and the Curtin title alone — constitute the core of a serious New Mexico healing-practice library.
L. S. M. Curtin and the 1947 first edition
Leonora Scott Muse Curtin (1879–1972) is one of the towering figures in the documentation of New Mexico’s folk healing traditions, and her Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande (Santa Fe: Laboratory of Anthropology, 1947) is the single most important first edition in this collecting category. Understanding who Curtin was, how the book came to be written, why it was published by the Laboratory of Anthropology rather than a commercial press, and what distinguishes the 1947 first from the subsequent Southwest Museum reprints is essential for anyone who encounters a copy of this book in an estate or donation context.
Curtin was not an academic botanist or a trained anthropologist. She was the daughter of Eva Scott Fényes, the Pasadena painter and ethnobotanist who had spent decades documenting plant use among the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico and among Hispano communities of the upper Rio Grande. Curtin grew up immersed in her mother’s documentation work and continued it after Fényes’s death, spending years conducting fieldwork in the Hispano villages of the Rio Grande valley — Chimayó, Truchas, Las Trampas, Santa Cruz, Tesuque, Galisteo, El Rito — collecting herbal preparations, remedios, and healing practices from village curanderas and abuelas. Her Spanish was fluent, her social standing in Santa Fe was substantial (she had founded the Santa Fe Native Market in 1934 to support village artisans during the Depression), and her network of informants was accumulated over decades of sustained relationship rather than extracted through a single field season. The result was a depth of documentation that no visiting academic could have matched.
L. S. M. Curtin, Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande (Santa Fe: Laboratory of Anthropology, 1947). The first edition is a substantial hardcover in plain binding — the Laboratory of Anthropology did not commission commercial dust jackets for its monograph series. The book is organized around plant entries: for each herb, Curtin provides the Spanish common name (and variants by village), the Pueblo common name where available, the scientific binomial, the preparation method (infusion, decoction, poultice, smoke, bath, topical application), the ailments treated, and the informant community. The line drawings by P. G. Napolitano are among the most elegant illustrations in New Mexico botanical literature; the frontispiece illustration of a curandera at her herb table is one of the iconic images of the genre. The salmon-ground cartographic endpaper maps the Upper Rio Grande villages from Albuquerque through Taos with hand-lettered place names. Points of issue: The 1947 Laboratory of Anthropology first is distinguished by its publication imprint on the title page and copyright page (“Laboratory of Anthropology, Santa Fe”) and the copyright year 1947. The Southwest Museum (Los Angeles) reprint of 1965 carries the Southwest Museum imprint and resets the copyright page with a note acknowledging the original publication; it is a reset edition, not a facsimile, and the Napolitano drawings are reproduced from new plates. The 1974 printing of the Southwest Museum edition carries “Second Printing 1974” on the copyright page. Condition sensitivity: the 1947 Laboratory first is almost invariably found in institutional copies with library stampings, call-number labels on the spine, and pocket-card holders pasted inside the back board. A truly private copy without institutional markings from the 1947 printing is a major find. Collector values: 1947 Laboratory first (no library markings, clean): serious collector territory. 1947 Library copy (marked): respectable collectible value. 1965 Southwest Museum reprint clean: the mid-range collectible zone. 1974 second printing: the common reading copy to mid-range zone.
The book Curtin produced is a document of the curandera-knowledge tradition as it existed in the early-to-mid twentieth century in the villages of the upper Rio Grande — a tradition that had already been partially eroded by the availability of patent medicines, the expansion of automobile roads, and the gradual penetration of biomedical healthcare into rural New Mexico. Curtin was documenting a living but already changing system. The plants she recorded, the preparation methods she documented, the ailments they were used to treat, and the names by which the plants were known in each village constitute an irreplaceable primary source for anyone studying the material-level dimension of curanderismo. The book is used and cited by everyone who works on New Mexico folk healing: Torres, Moore, Kay, and every subsequent herbalist who writes about the Rio Grande tradition has Curtin on the desk.
Curtin’s other major work in this tradition is By the Prophet of the Earth: Ethnobotany of the Pima (1949), published by the San Vicente Foundation, which documents plant use among the Akimel O’odham (Pima) of Arizona rather than New Mexico Hispano communities. By the Prophet of the Earth is a companion volume to Healing Herbs in the sense that it documents an Indigenous plant-medicine tradition from the same researcher; it is less directly relevant to the New Mexico curanderismo category but belongs in any comprehensive Southwestern healing-practice collection. The 1949 first edition is also a significant find; copies with the original San Vicente Foundation imprint are scarce.
Torres and the mechanics of curanderismo practice
The gap between Curtin’s 1947 fieldwork and the emergence of a substantial curanderismo-practice literature in English was filled primarily by Eliseo “Cheo” Torres, whose published works constitute the most accessible and practically detailed account of how curanderismo healing actually works. Torres is not merely an academic interpreter of curanderismo; he is a practicing curandero who received training in the tradition in the border communities of south Texas and Tamaulipas and who has continued that practice throughout his career at the University of New Mexico. His books do something that purely academic ethnographies cannot: they convey the phenomenology of curanderismo practice from the inside, describing not only what is done but why it is done and what it feels like to do it.
Eliseo Torres, The Folk Healer: The Mexican-American Tradition of Curanderismo (Kingsville, TX: Nieves Press, 1983). Torres’s Nieves Press publications are the small-press cornerstone of his bibliography. The Folk Healer is an introductory treatment aimed at students, healthcare workers, and general readers who want to understand curanderismo as a functional healing system. Torres explains the tradition’s historical roots in the colonial synthesis of Indigenous Mesoamerican herbalism, Spanish Galenic medicine, Moorish-Arabic medical theory, and African healing traditions. He introduces the practitioner types, explains the folk illness categories (mal de ojo, susto, empacho, bilis, and others), and situates curanderismo within the contemporary Mexican-American healthcare landscape of the 1980s — an era when many Mexican-American families still turned to curanderas and yerberas before or alongside visiting a physician. The Nieves Press edition is a small paperback with a modest print run; clean copies without heavy handling marks are less common than the publication date would suggest. Nieves Press was Torres’s own imprint, which means the distribution was limited almost entirely to direct sales, university bookstores, and specialty retailers. Collector value: solid mid-range collectible value for a clean copy in the 1983 Nieves Press first; signed copies carry additional premium.
Eliseo Torres and Timothy L. Sawyer Jr., Healing with Herbs and Rituals: A Mexican Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006; ISBN 0-8263-3265-6). The most technically detailed of Torres’s works on curanderismo practice. Torres and Sawyer document specific remedios (herbal preparations), limpias (spiritual cleansing rituals), and healing ceremonies with systematic attention to both the material dimension (which plants, which preparations, which ritual objects) and the spiritual dimension (which prayers, which saints, which cosmological framework governs the healing). The book is organized thematically: there are chapters on specific folk illnesses and their treatments, chapters on the material culture of curanderismo (the curandera’s working kit of herbs, oils, candles, eggs, and religious images), and chapters on the ritual protocols that govern how healing is conducted. The UNM Press trade paperback format (no hardcover was issued) makes it more accessible than the Nieves Press small-press publications but slightly less interesting as a collectible object in its own right. Points of issue: the 2006 UNM Press first trade paperback is the only edition; ISBN 0-8263-3265-6 on the copyright page. Torres signs frequently at UNM events, at curanderismo workshops, and at Traditional Medicine Without Borders program events; signed copies are available but not systematically documented by the book trade. Collector value: common reading copy range unsigned; solid mid-range collectible value signed first.
Trotter, Chavira, and the ethnographic foundation
The academic foundation of curanderismo studies as a healing-practice literature rests on Robert T. Trotter II and Juan Antonio Chavira’s Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981; second edition 1997). This book remains the most comprehensive single-volume ethnographic account of curanderismo as a complete healing system — not merely a collection of plant remedies or a survey of folk illness beliefs, but a full account of how the system works as an integrated social, spiritual, and material practice.
Trotter was an anthropologist who brought rigorous fieldwork methods to the documentation of curanderismo practice in the lower Rio Grande valley of Texas. Chavira was a sociologist and a practicing curandero from the same region, which gave the collaboration a rare quality: the academic rigor of trained fieldwork combined with the insider knowledge of a practitioner who had learned the tradition from the inside. The result is a book that satisfies the standards of academic ethnography while also conveying the experiential reality of curanderismo practice in a way that purely academic treatments rarely achieve.
The three-level framework that Trotter and Chavira formalized — the material level (herbs, massage, physical treatment), the spiritual level (prayer, ritual, limpias), and the mental level (divination, visualization, psychic healing) — became the standard analytical framework for subsequent curanderismo scholarship. Every subsequent treatment of curanderismo in the academic literature, including Torres’s own published work, uses the Trotter/Chavira three-level framework as its organizational backbone. The book also provides the most detailed published account of curanderismo’s material culture: the specific herbs used in different preparations, the religious images and candles that function as ritual instruments, the eggs and oils and holy water that appear in limpias, and the social protocols that govern how a curandero interacts with patients, how a healer acquires and develops her gift (el don), and how the practitioner community is organized.
Points of issue — Trotter/Chavira Curanderismo (1981 and 1997): The 1981 University of Georgia Press first edition is a small hardcover; the dust jacket features stylized herbal imagery in ochre and brown tones. No printing statement appears on the copyright page of the first printing; later printings add “Second printing” etc. The hardcover binding is cloth over boards in tan or off-white; the spine lettering is stamped. The 1997 second edition (also UGA Press) is issued as a trade paperback with an updated cover design and a new preface by the authors; it is a revised and reset edition rather than a simple reprint. The 1981 hardcover first in clean condition with intact jacket is the collector target; the 1997 paperback is the working-library standard and is available for common reading copy range. Collector value: 1981 hardcover first in clean jacket: solid mid-range collectible value. 1981 hardcover without jacket or with jacket wear: the common reading copy to mid-range zone.
Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women Doctors
The oral-history and life-narrative tradition in curanderismo scholarship produced some of its most compelling texts from women scholars working with women healers. Bobette Perrone, H. Henrietta Stockel, and Victoria Krueger’s Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women Doctors (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989) is the most important of these, placing curandera oral histories alongside parallel accounts from Native American women medicine practitioners and Anglo women physicians who practiced in the Southwest in the early and mid twentieth century.
The comparative structure is the book’s most distinctive feature. By presenting three different traditions of women’s healing in the same volume, the authors make visible the structural parallels — the apprenticeship transmission of knowledge, the social stigma that professional women healers in all three traditions confronted, the particular bodily knowledge of women’s reproductive health that crosscut all three systems — while also illuminating the profound differences in cosmological framework, diagnostic method, and therapeutic protocol. The curandera voices in the book are among the most candid and detailed accounts of curanderismo practice from active practitioners available in print. Where Torres and Trotter/Chavira write primarily from the researcher’s perspective (even when Torres is writing as a practitioner), the Perrone/Stockel/Krueger curanderas speak in their own voices about their training, their patients, their herbs, their prayers, and their understanding of how and why their healing works.
H. Henrietta Stockel went on to become one of the most important scholars of Apache history and culture in New Mexico and Arizona, publishing extensively on Chiricahua Apache culture, the Ghost Dance, and the history of Apache communities in the post-reservation era. Her broader body of work — available in used-book condition throughout the Southwest — constitutes a significant secondary shelf for the curanderismo and Indigenous healing-practice collector.
Points of issue — Perrone/Stockel/Krueger, Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women Doctors (OU Press, 1989)
First edition: University of Oklahoma Press (Norman), 1989, hardcover in illustrated dust jacket (full color, portraits of women healers). The OU Press first hardcover is the collector target; the press issued a paperback edition in their standard Oklahoma Paperbacks imprint. Print run was typical of academic regional press titles of the era. Check the copyright page for “First edition” or first-printing statement; OU Press first editions of this era typically carry a number line on the copyright page (10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 for a true first printing). The dust jacket is condition-sensitive at the spine, where yellowing occurs; find a clean white-spine copy. Collector value: the mid-range collectible zone clean first in jacket; common reading copy range paperback or jacketed copy with wear.
Michael Moore and the Southwest School of Botanical Medicine
Michael Moore (1941–2009) occupies a unique position in the literature of Southwestern healing practices. He was not an academic, not a curandero in the traditional sense, not a trained scientist. He was a self-taught field botanist, pharmacognosist, and clinical herbalist who spent decades learning plant medicine directly from the land, from practicing curanderas and parteras in New Mexico and Arizona, from the ethnobotanical literature, and from his own extensive clinical practice in Albuquerque. The result was a body of work that sits at the precise intersection of the curanderismo herbolaria tradition and the modern clinical herbalism revival: books that could be read by both a New Mexico abuelita who had grown up gathering estafiate from the arroyo and a naturopathic physician in Portland looking to expand her botanical pharmacopoeia.
Moore spent much of his career in Albuquerque, where he practiced clinical herbalism, taught extensively, and produced his foundational Southwest herb guides. The Museum of New Mexico Press, which published his first major title, was his natural institutional home: the same press that published anthropological, archaeological, and folk-arts scholarship on New Mexico was the right publisher for a work that treated the medicinal plants of the mountain West as cultural as well as botanical objects. His later books — including Los Remedios specifically — drew directly on the curanderismo herbolaria tradition, documenting the Spanish-language plant names, preparation methods, and therapeutic uses of the herbs in the curandera pharmacopoeia in a format that clinical herbalists could use.
Michael Moore, Medicinal Plants of the Mountain West (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1979; revised and expanded second edition, 2003; ISBN 0-89013-454-7 for the 2003 edition). Moore’s landmark reference on the medicinal flora of the Rocky Mountain and Great Basin West. The 1979 first edition documents medicinal plants from New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada with the regional specificity that distinguishes Moore’s work from national herb guides: he knows which plants grow where, what the regional common names are, which preparation methods are traditional in the borderlands context, and which communities have used which plants for which conditions. The book includes extensive coverage of plants central to the curanderismo pharmacopoeia — estafiate (Artemisia spp.), epazote, yerba de la negrita, manzanilla, oshá, chaparro amargoso, and dozens of others — documented both in their ethnobotanical context and with pharmacognostic information on preparation and activity. Points of issue: the 1979 Museum of New Mexico Press first edition is a trade paperback; no hardcover was issued. The 2003 second edition (same press) is substantially revised and expanded, adds new species, and updates the pharmacognosy. The first edition is the collector’s target for its historical significance; the second edition is the more practical working reference. Collector value: 1979 first paperback (clean): solid mid-range collectible value. 2003 second edition: common reading copy range.
Michael Moore, Los Remedios: Traditional Herbal Remedies of the Southwest (Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 1990; ISBN 1-878610-06-5). Moore’s most direct engagement with the curanderismo herbolaria tradition. Los Remedios is organized around the Spanish-language plant names used in the Hispano New Mexico and Mexican border-community traditions — an explicit acknowledgment that this pharmacopoeia belongs to a specific cultural tradition, not to a universal botany. The book documents preparation methods (the specific infusion strengths, drying and storage practices, and combination formulas used in the curandera tradition), therapeutic applications as recognized in the folk-healing system, and Moore’s own clinical experience with the plants over decades of practice in Albuquerque. It is the book that most directly bridges Curtin’s 1947 ethnobotanical documentation and the modern clinical-herbalism application of that knowledge. Red Crane Books was a small Santa Fe press that published several important New Mexico regional titles; the first edition is a small-format trade paperback. Points of issue: Red Crane Books first edition (1990), ISBN 1-878610-06-5. The press issued several printings; the first printing is identified by the absence of additional-printing statements on the copyright page. Clean copies of the first printing without heavy use markings are uncommon. Collector value: solid mid-range collectible value for a clean first-printing copy.
Moore’s institutional legacy is the Southwest School of Botanical Medicine (SWSBM), which he founded in Bisbee, Arizona, after relocating from Albuquerque. The SWSBM was a residential herb-medicine school offering intensive immersion training in Southwestern plant medicine, traditional curanderismo herbolaria, and clinical herbalism to students from across North America. The school trained hundreds of clinical herbalists over the years of its operation and was, in effect, the institutional equivalent of the UNM curanderismo program for the non-academic herbal-medicine community: a bridge institution that took traditional knowledge out of its purely community context and made it available to a wider audience of practitioners. After Moore’s death in 2009, the SWSBM library was maintained online at swsbm.com as the Moore Memorial Library, with the full text of Moore’s books available in free PDF format — a deliberate act of open-access archiving by his successors that has made Moore’s work more widely available than it ever was in print.
For the book collector, the SWSBM’s open-access digital archive does not diminish the value of physical Moore first editions; it reinforces it. The print editions are artifacts of a specific moment in the history of Southwestern herbalism, and the copies that Moore personally handled, annotated, and sold at his lectures carry an irreplaceable provenance. Moore signed generously at workshops and at his Albuquerque clinic; signed copies of his principal titles are a genuine collector category, though Moore’s death in 2009 has closed the pool.
Stephen Buhner and the spiritual-plant-medicine tradition
Stephen Harrod Buhner is the most prolific and widely read American author working at the intersection of traditional plant-medicine systems and the spiritual-cosmological dimension of herbal healing. Buhner trained in herbalism, ethnobotany, and cross-cultural healing traditions and has published more than a dozen books, ranging from technical clinical-herbalism guides (the Healing Lyme series, Herbal Antibiotics) to philosophical treatments of the human–plant relationship (The Secret Teachings of Plants, The Lost Language of Plants). His work is relevant to the New Mexico curanderismo collecting category primarily through Sacred Plant Medicine: The Wisdom in Native American Herbalism, which directly addresses the spiritual dimension of plant-medicine practice that the material-level herb guides leave out.
Stephen Harrod Buhner, Sacred Plant Medicine: The Wisdom in Native American Herbalism (Boulder, CO: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1996; subsequently reissued by Bear & Company, Rochester, VT, as Sacred Plant Medicine: Explorations in the Practice of Indigenous Herbalism). Buhner’s central argument is that effective plant medicine requires not only knowledge of a plant’s pharmacological properties but a cultivated relationship with the plant as a living being — an approach to plant healing that is structurally identical to the curanderismo understanding that healing requires the curandero’s spiritual attunement, not merely technical knowledge of preparation. Buhner draws on Indigenous healing traditions from across North America, with particular attention to the Southwest, and his framework resonates directly with the Trotter/Chavira three-level model: the material level of herbs and preparations maps onto pharmacology, but the spiritual and mental levels require exactly the kind of plant-relationship work that Buhner describes. The connection between Buhner’s framework and curanderismo is not incidental; Buhner explicitly acknowledges the curanderismo tradition as one of his primary reference points. Points of issue: The Roberts Rinehart 1996 first edition is the collector target; the Bear & Company reissue represents a different publisher’s reset edition with updated material. Collector value: Roberts Rinehart 1996 first: solid mid-range collectible value. Bear & Company edition: modest value.
Margarita Kay and the pharmacognosy synthesis
Margarita Artschwager Kay’s Healing with Plants in the American and Mexican West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996) represents the synthesis of ethnobotany, medical anthropology, and pharmacognosy that the curanderismo-herbolaria literature had been building toward since Curtin’s 1947 fieldwork. Kay brought a dual credential to the subject: she was trained as both an anthropologist and a pharmacist, which meant she could evaluate a traditional plant preparation both for its cultural significance within the curanderismo system and for its pharmacological plausibility from the perspective of modern pharmaceutical science. The result is the most rigorous published treatment of the interface between curanderismo herbolaria and Western biomedicine available in a single volume.
Kay’s methodology was systematic: for each plant in the curanderismo pharmacopoeia, she documented the Spanish-language common names (with regional variants), the folk illness categories for which the plant was indicated, the preparation methods used in the curandera tradition (which affect both the active compound profile and the therapeutic effect), and the current scientific literature on the plant’s active constituents. She was not trying to validate or invalidate curanderismo; she was trying to understand how the curandera pharmacopoeia actually worked — which preparations contained active compounds with documented biological activity, which operated primarily through the ritual and relational dimensions of healing, and which were pharmacologically inert but therapeutically effective through psychosocial mechanisms. The findings were, broadly, that the curandera pharmacopoeia contained a substantial proportion of preparations with documented pharmacological activity for the conditions they were used to treat — a result that aligned with similar findings from the ethnobotanical literature globally.
Points of issue — Kay, Healing with Plants in the American and Mexican West (UAP, 1996)
First edition: University of Arizona Press (Tucson), 1996. The UAP issues its titles in hardcover with dust jacket and simultaneously or shortly thereafter in trade paperback. The hardcover first is the collector target; the paperback is the working-library standard. Check the copyright page for first-printing identification; UAP first editions of the 1990s typically carry number lines. The dust jacket is a full-color botanical illustration of Southwestern medicinal plants. Collector value: hardcover first in clean jacket: solid mid-range collectible value. Trade paperback first or later printing: common reading copy range.
The Spanish-Indigenous-African syncretic healing tradition
The curanderismo of New Mexico is not a monolithic tradition derived from a single source. It is the product of four centuries of synthesis among distinct healing systems that met and mingled in the upper Rio Grande valley: Indigenous Mesoamerican herbalism transmitted northward through the trade networks that connected the Aztec heartland with the Pueblo Southwest; Spanish colonial Galenic and humoral medicine carried by the first colonists and reinforced by the Franciscan missionaries who trained as healers; Moorish-Arabic medical theory that entered the New World through Spain’s seven centuries of Al-Andalus; and African healing traditions carried by enslaved and freed Afro-Mexican persons in the Spanish colonial population of New Mexico.
The African contribution to curanderismo is the least documented in the published literature and deserves specific note. New Mexico’s Spanish colonial population included a significant population of Afro-Mexican origin from the earliest settlements — enslaved Africans, free Blacks, and mixed-heritage individuals who had absorbed African-derived healing knowledge from traditions that included Yoruba medicine, Kongolese botanical practices, and the syncretic healing systems of the Caribbean and Gulf Coast. These individuals — whose histories are only partially recoverable from the colonial archive — contributed specific plant uses, specific spiritual-healing protocols, and specific understandings of illness causation that were absorbed into the curanderismo system without being identified as “African” because the cultural categories of race and heritage in colonial New Mexico operated differently than they did in Anglo-Protestant North America. The African contribution to the curanderismo pharmacopoeia is an active area of historical and ethnobotanical research; it is not yet fully documented in a single published monograph, but it surfaces in the footnotes of the best curanderismo ethnographies and in the broader Afro-Latino healing-tradition literature.
The Pueblo contribution to curanderismo is better documented but still constrained by the Pueblo communities’ deliberately protective stance toward sacred and ceremonial knowledge. Pueblo medicine societies hold healing knowledge as community property that is transmitted through authorized channels, not published for general circulation, and responsible scholars have respected those boundaries. What the published record shows is the material-level overlap: many of the same plants appear in both the Hispano curanderismo pharmacopoeia and the Pueblo medicinal plant traditions, including some that were clearly adopted into the Hispano tradition from Pueblo knowledge (oshá, or bear root, is a characteristic example: its use as a respiratory and infectious-disease remedy in both traditions reflects direct Pueblo-to-Hispano transmission). What the published record does not show — because it would violate the boundaries that Pueblo communities have drawn — is the spiritual and ceremonial dimension of Pueblo healing practice.
The three levels in practice — material, spiritual, mental
The Trotter/Chavira three-level model is not merely an analytical framework invented by academic ethnographers; it reflects a distinction that practicing curanderos make in describing their own work and in assessing whether a given healer has the capacity to work at the deeper levels of the tradition. Understanding the three levels helps explain why the curanderismo and herbal medicine literature is not a single genre but a spectrum of texts operating at different levels of depth.
Books that operate primarily at the material level (nivel material) are the most accessible and the most widely published: the herb guides (Curtin, Moore, Kay), the remedios collections (Torres’s early books), the herbal manuals produced for community healthcare outreach. These books document what to take, how to prepare it, and what conditions it treats. A reader can use a material-level text without any engagement with the spiritual or mental dimensions of the tradition and still benefit from the pharmacologically active plants it describes. The material-level texts dominate the book trade because they can be marketed to a general audience interested in herbal medicine without requiring any engagement with folk religion, spiritual healing, or the cosmological frameworks that govern the deeper levels of the tradition.
Books that operate at the spiritual level (nivel espiritual) require a different kind of engagement. The limpia (spiritual cleansing) literature, the discussions of mal puesto and curse removal, the accounts of how a curandera’s prayer life and Catholic devotional practice are integrated with her herbal work — these accounts are present in Trotter/Chavira, in the Perrone/Stockel/Krueger oral histories, and in Torres’s deeper works, but they are less visible in the material-level herb guides. For some collectors and most mainstream booksellers, the spiritual-level content is the category that makes curanderismo books seem “weird” or unsellable; it is precisely this content that makes them culturally irreplaceable.
Books that operate at the mental level (nivel mental) — divination, telepathic diagnosis, visualization, energetic healing — are the least represented in the mainstream publishing record, because this is the dimension of curanderismo practice that is furthest from anything Western medicine recognizes. Buhner’s work gets closest to describing this level in accessible English; some of the gray literature from UNM curanderismo program events addresses it directly. The mental-level materials that surface in donation piles are the most likely to be discarded by thrift sorters who cannot evaluate them, and they are the most in need of preservation by someone who understands what they represent.
The three-tier collector market
The curanderismo and herbal medicine collecting category maps onto the same three-tier market structure as the other NMLP pillar guides, with a distinctive feature: the most valuable title in the category (Curtin 1947) is a WPA-era institutional monograph that most casual dealers and thrift shops cannot identify, rather than a signed literary first edition with an obviously desirable collectible profile. This means that the price gaps between the tiers are larger than in most other New Mexico categories, and the undervalued middle tier (the Moore and Torres Nieves Press firsts) is more persistently underpriced relative to scholarly significance than in categories with more mainstream collector awareness.
Tier 1 — Rare and trophy editions (upper mid-range collectible value)
L. S. M. Curtin, Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande (Laboratory of Anthropology, Santa Fe, 1947) first edition — private copy without library markings: serious collector territory. Library copy with institutional markings: respectable collectible value. Curtin 1965 Southwest Museum reprint (Los Angeles) in clean condition: the mid-range collectible zone. Michael Moore, Medicinal Plants of the Desert and Canyon West (Museum of New Mexico Press, first edition, 1979) in clean condition — the first printing of Moore’s debut book in the original Museum of NM Press format: solid mid-range collectible value. Any copy with Moore’s signature (closed pool since 2009): add solid mid-range collectible value premium. Curtin, By the Prophet of the Earth (San Vicente Foundation, 1949) first edition clean: respectable collectible value.
Tier 2 — Collector targets (the mid-range collectible zone)
Curtin 1974 second printing of the Southwest Museum edition (clean): the common reading copy to mid-range zone. Moore, Medicinal Plants of the Mountain West (Museum of NM Press, 1979, first edition) in clean condition: solid mid-range collectible value. Moore, Los Remedios (Red Crane Books, Santa Fe, 1990) first printing clean: solid mid-range collectible value. Torres, The Folk Healer (Nieves Press, Kingsville TX, 1983) first clean: solid mid-range collectible value. Trotter and Chavira, Curanderismo (UGA Press, 1981) first hardcover in clean jacket: solid mid-range collectible value. Perrone/Stockel/Krueger, Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women Doctors (OU Press, 1989) first hardcover in clean jacket: the mid-range collectible zone. Kay, Healing with Plants in the American and Mexican West (UAP, 1996) first hardcover in clean jacket: solid mid-range collectible value. Buhner, Sacred Plant Medicine (Roberts Rinehart, 1996) first: solid mid-range collectible value. Torres, Healing with Herbs and Rituals (UNM Press, 2006) signed first: solid mid-range collectible value.
Tier 3 — Working library (common reading copy range)
Torres, Healing with Herbs and Rituals (UNM Press, 2006) unsigned first. Moore, Medicinal Plants of the Mountain West second edition (Museum of NM Press, 2003). Moore, Medicinal Plants of the Pacific West (Red Crane Books, 1993). All paperback reprints and later editions of any of the above. Buhner subsequent editions and additional titles. Spanish-language curandera herb manuals and yerbera pamphlets of any era. SWSBM photocopied course materials and handouts. UNM curanderismo program publications and conference proceedings. Partera and midwifery texts with New Mexico connections. General Southwest herbalism guides (Tilford, McIntyre, de la Foret). Common ethnobotany titles documenting New Mexico plant use (Dunmire & Tierney, Moerman). Any title from the curanderismo-adjacent category: Torres Curandero (UNM Press, 2005) unsigned, Trotter/Chavira 1997 second edition paperback, Perrone/Stockel/Krueger paperback editions.
Points of issue — key editions at a glance
For the collector or donation evaluator who needs to identify what is in the pile, here are the critical edition-identification details for the principal titles in this category.
Curtin, Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande (1947)
True first: Laboratory of Anthropology imprint on title page and copyright page (not Southwest Museum); copyright year 1947; plain cloth binding in dark green or olive without dust jacket in most copies; P. G. Napolitano line drawings; salmon-ground cartographic endpaper of Upper Rio Grande villages; Castetter foreword. The Southwest Museum 1965 reprint carries “Southwest Museum, Los Angeles” on the title page and copyright page; it is a reset edition. The 1974 second printing of the Southwest Museum edition carries “Second Printing 1974” on the copyright page. Library copies of the 1947 first are common; private copies without institutional markings are rare. Any copy of the 1947 first should be checked for completeness of the Napolitano plates (some copies have been excised).
Moore, Medicinal Plants of the Mountain West (1979 / 2003)
The 1979 Museum of New Mexico Press first edition is a trade paperback; no hardcover was issued. The 2003 second edition (also Museum of NM Press) is a substantially revised and expanded trade paperback with a new cover design and updated species accounts. The 1979 first is identified by the Museum of NM Press copyright page showing 1979 date and no subsequent-edition statement. The 2003 second edition shows “Second Edition” on the title page. Note: the book is sometimes listed under the title Medicinal Plants of the Desert and Canyon West in some catalog records, reflecting the original working title; the published first edition title is Medicinal Plants of the Mountain West.
Moore, Los Remedios (Red Crane Books, 1990)
First printing: Red Crane Books, Santa Fe, 1990; ISBN 1-878610-06-5 on copyright page; small-format trade paperback. Red Crane issued multiple printings without significant design changes; the first printing is identified by the absence of additional-printing statements. Red Crane Books was a small Santa Fe independent press that published through the 1990s; copies in the original Red Crane first printing are becoming scarce as the press is no longer active.
Torres, The Folk Healer (Nieves Press, 1983)
First edition: Nieves Press, Kingsville, TX, 1983. Small paperback issued in a modest print run through direct sales and university bookstores. No hardcover edition was issued. The Nieves Press imprint identifies the first printing; no subsequent Nieves Press editions of this title appear. Later publishers have issued translations and derivative editions; the Nieves Press 1983 first is the original English-language collector target.
Torres and Sawyer, Healing with Herbs and Rituals (UNM Press, 2006)
First edition: University of New Mexico Press, 2006; ISBN 0-8263-3265-6 on copyright page; trade paperback only (no hardcover issued). UNM Press trade paperback firsts from this era typically carry a number line on the copyright page; the first printing shows 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 or similar. Torres signs frequently at UNM and curanderismo program events; signed copies are available but not systematically tracked by the secondary market.
Kay, Healing with Plants in the American and Mexican West (UAP, 1996)
First edition: University of Arizona Press (Tucson), 1996; hardcover in illustrated dust jacket and simultaneous or shortly subsequent trade paperback. The hardcover first is identified by the UAP copyright page showing 1996 date and first-printing number line. The dust jacket features full-color botanical illustration in the UAP Southwest Studies format. The paperback first carries the same ISBN with a PB suffix.
Survivorship pressures unique to this category
The curanderismo and herbal medicine literature faces a distinctive set of survivorship pressures that make its most important titles systematically underrepresented in the public secondary market relative to their scholarly and cultural significance.
Institutional format: the most important title in the category — Curtin’s 1947 Laboratory of Anthropology first — is an institutional monograph that looks like an obscure government publication to any thrift worker who picks it up. The plain green binding, the absence of a commercial dust jacket, and the institutional imprint combine to make it appear worthless to anyone who does not know what it is. The 1965 Southwest Museum reprint has a slightly more recognizable collector profile because Southwest Museum publications have enough secondary market presence to be recognizable by experienced thrift pickers, but even the 1965 reprint is regularly undervalued.
Use-wear on working copies: Moore’s herb guides were working tools. Curanderas, herbalists, and students annotated them, flagged pages with stickies, wrote in the margins, stained the pages with plant preparations, and physically wore out the bindings. A copy of Medicinal Plants of the Mountain West or Los Remedios that belonged to an active herbalist will show this use wear dramatically, and use-worn copies are not collector targets regardless of their historical interest. The survivorship consequence is that clean, lightly read copies of Moore’s practical guides are disproportionately scarce relative to the print runs, because the print runs were absorbed primarily by practitioners who used them heavily.
Cultural category drift: the herbal medicine shelf in a thrift shop is typically adjacent to the New Age, self-help, and alternative medicine shelves. Books from these adjacent categories are not systematically worthless — early editions of specific holistic health titles have genuine collector value — but the categorical association makes thrift workers and casual pickers less likely to pay careful attention to edition points and publication history when they encounter a Buhner or a Moore. The result is that genuine Tier 2 collector targets (Moore Los Remedios first printing, Buhner Roberts Rinehart 1996 first) are routinely priced and shelved as a few dollars New Age paperbacks.
Spanish-language attrition: a significant portion of the curandera herbal-manual literature is in Spanish or bilingual format. Chain-thrift sorting operations that cannot evaluate non-English books route them to the discard bin or to bulk export without evaluation. A Spanish-language yerbera pamphlet from 1940s New Mexico that is a significant primary-source document for curanderismo practice history gets treated as an untranslatable paperback and discarded.
Gray literature and ephemeral publications
Beyond the commercial and academic-press publications, the curanderismo and herbal medicine tradition has generated a substantial body of ephemeral and gray literature that surfaces in estate and institutional-clearance donations and that requires specific attention from anyone who encounters it.
UNM Traditional Medicine Without Borders program materials: conference binders, workshop handouts, program brochures, and participant notebooks from UNM curanderismo program events document the institutional history of curanderismo’s incorporation into American higher education from the inside. These materials are not commercially published, have no barcodes, and are not catalogued in OCLC; they survive only in the personal libraries of program participants and in UNM departmental offices. They are exactly the kind of materials that disappear in office clearances unless someone pays attention.
SWSBM photocopied course materials: the Southwest School of Botanical Medicine produced extensive photocopied course handouts for its Bisbee residential programs — plant monographs, preparation protocols, materia medica study guides, and laboratory notes in Michael Moore’s hand or produced under his supervision. These materials circulated among SWSBM alumni and were informally shared; they survive in the personal libraries of herbalists who trained with Moore. Some have been digitized at swsbm.com; others have not. Physical copies are irreplaceable primary sources for the institutional history of the American clinical-herbalism revival.
New Mexico extension-service publications: the New Mexico State University agricultural extension service produced a long series of publications on traditional and practical topics including herbal and food-preservation knowledge that overlaps substantially with the curandera herbolaria tradition. Fabiola Cabeza de Baca’s Historic Cookery (Extension Circular 161, 1939 and subsequent printings) is the most widely known of these; but dozens of less famous extension circulars documented remedios, herbal preparations, and traditional food-as-medicine knowledge for distribution to rural families across New Mexico. These bulletins are printed on cheap paper, were distributed free or at minimal cost, and were not preserved by anyone who thought of them as collectible objects.
Spanish-language yerbera pamphlets: handwritten or small-press-printed herb lists, remedios collections, and curandera preparation guides in Spanish circulated in New Mexico Hispano communities from the colonial period through the twentieth century. The earliest surviving examples are manuscript documents held by archives and special collections; twentieth-century examples (typed, mimeographed, or photocopied) surface in estate donations with some frequency. These documents are not listed in any bibliography and have no secondary market price; their cultural and historical value is inverse to their commercial visibility.
External research references
- Leonora Scott Muse Curtin — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonora_Scott_Curtin — biographical entry on the Santa Fe ethnobotanist and Native Market founder (1879–1972).
- Eliseo Torres — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliseo_Torres — biographical entry on the UNM curanderismo scholar and practitioner.
- Stephen Harrod Buhner — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Harrod_Buhner — biographical entry on the plant-medicine author.
- Southwest School of Botanical Medicine (Michael Moore archive): swsbm.com — the Moore Memorial Library; free PDFs of all Moore’s principal works and extensive materia medica files.
- Laboratory of Anthropology (Museum of New Mexico): nmhistorymuseum.org/laboratory-of-anthropology — the institution that published the Curtin 1947 first edition; now the research division of the New Mexico History Museum.
- University of New Mexico Press: unmpress.com — publisher of Torres’s UNM Press titles (Curandero, Healing with Herbs and Rituals) and of the principal Hispano New Mexico scholarly titles in this category.
- Museum of New Mexico Press: mnmpress.org — publisher of Michael Moore’s Medicinal Plants of the Mountain West (1979 and 2003 editions).
- University of Oklahoma Press: oupress.com — publisher of Perrone/Stockel/Krueger Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women Doctors; extensive backlist of Southwestern and Native American cultural studies titles.
- University of Arizona Press — Southwest Studies: uapress.arizona.edu — publisher of Kay’s Healing with Plants; the principal academic press for borderlands healing-practice scholarship.
- University of Georgia Press: ugapress.org — publisher of Trotter and Chavira’s Curanderismo (1981 and 1997); holds the rights to the key academic ethnography in this category.
- El Rancho de las Golondrinas: golondrinas.org — the living-history museum at La Cienega founded on the property acquired by Curtin’s daughter; the institutional heir to the Curtin family’s New Mexico cultural preservation work, with herbolaria demonstrations in the summer season.
- Indian Pueblo Cultural Center: indianpueblo.org — Albuquerque-based cultural center of the 19 Pueblos; source for Pueblo-authorized documentation of healing traditions.
- New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program: nmstemwomen.wixsite.com/historic-women-markers — the program that recognized Curtin, Fényes, and Curtin Paloheimo as the Three Wise Women of the Acequia Madre House.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Curtin Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande 1947 first edition and why is it so rare?
What distinguishes this curanderismo herbal pillar from the general curanderismo folk healing pillar?
Who is Michael Moore and what is the Southwest School of Botanical Medicine?
What are the three levels of curanderismo and why do they matter for understanding the literature?
What is Perrone, Stockel, and Krueger's Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women Doctors?
What is Buhner's Sacred Plant Medicine and how does it relate to New Mexico?
What is Margarita Kay's Healing with Plants in the American and Mexican West?
Why are curanderismo and herbal medicine books especially vulnerable to loss at thrift shops?
Where should I donate curanderismo, folk healing, and herbal medicine books in New Mexico?
Not sure what you have? Text me a photo at 702-496-4214 and I’ll tell you what I see.
I pick up books for free anywhere in the metro area. Call 702-496-4214 to schedule.
Have books you’re ready to part with? I offer free pickup across Albuquerque — call 702-496-4214.
Not sure whether to sell, donate, or keep? Call or text me at 702-496-4214 — I’ll walk you through it.
Found old books in an estate or attic? Text me a photo at 702-496-4214 and I’ll tell you what I see.
Inherited a library and not sure where to start? Call or text 702-496-4214 — I handle this all the time.
Have curanderismo or herbal medicine books?
I pick up free — any condition, any quantity
NMLP recognizes the cultural and scholarly significance of curanderismo herbolaria, traditional healing-practice literature, and Southwestern plant-medicine books. I take what chain thrifts reject — including non-English editions, institutional monographs without dust jackets, and practitioner’s working copies with herbal stains. Free pickup anywhere in the Albuquerque metro, Santa Fe, Española, Las Vegas NM, and Socorro.
Related on this site
- New Mexico Curanderismo & Folk Healing Books — the broader companion pillar covering Kiev, Jaramillo, Cabeza de Baca, Simmons on brujería, Weigle, and the Penitente healing tradition.
- Collecting New Mexico Ethnobotany — Curtin, Fényes, Dunmire & Tierney — the parallel ethnobotany pillar; the yerbera tradition bridges both categories.
- New Mexico Hispano Literature — Anaya, Ulibarrí, Chávez — the broader Hispano literary tradition; Cabeza de Baca and Jaramillo appear here and in the herbal pillar.
- Collecting New Mexico Cookbooks — the food-as-medicine overlap; Cabeza de Baca’s Historic Cookery and Jaramillo’s Tasty Recipes straddle both categories.
- Archive Entry: Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, Curtin (1965 Southwest Museum reprint / 1974 second printing) — the NMLP donation archive entry for an Albuquerque Public Library discard copy of the Southwest Museum reprint, with full catalog detail, condition notes, and edition identification photographs.
- New Mexico Agriculture & Acequia Farming Books — the traditional land-use tradition that provides the agricultural substrate of the curandera herbolaria pharmacopoeia.
- New Mexico Pueblo Sovereignty & Governance Books — the Pueblo communities whose plant-medicine knowledge overlaps with curanderismo herbolaria.
- All Pillar Guides — the full index of NMLP regional reference pillars.
- The NMLP Donation Archive — the full open archive of regionally significant donated books.
- Free Book Pickup — Albuquerque — schedule the pickup.
Cite as: Eldred, Josh. “New Mexico Curanderismo, Folk Healing & Herbal Medicine — Book Collecting.” New Mexico Literacy Project, May 14, 2026. https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/new-mexico-curanderismo-folk-healing-herbal-books-collecting
Cite This Guide
Eldred, J. (May 2026). New Mexico curanderismo, folk healing & herbal medicine — book collecting. New Mexico Literacy Project.
https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/new-mexico-curanderismo-folk-healing-herbal-books-collecting
Content is original research by Josh Eldred. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Cite with attribution.