Pre-Hispanic notions of heat and cold continue to shape native Mexican ideas about health and illness in humans and food plants. In The Hot and the Cold, Jacques Chevalier and Andres Sanchez Bain examine indigenous worldview and myth, and challenge the prevailing notion that hot-cold reasoning in Latin America is a product of the Hippocratic humoral doctrine brought by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century.

Based on extensive field work in southern Veracruz, this innovative study details folk tales and stories of illness from indigenous people, and provides explanations that...