BY ANGELICA KLYCE

In Salvador, Brazil, the walls of Sala dos Milagres tell the stories of generations of bodies that have suffered and been healed. Photographs and handwritten notes are archived here, but most special of all small representations of arms, legs, hearts and other parts of the body that have been left behind as ex-votos offerings, in thanks for prayers that have been answered.

Each object represents an experience of illness, hope, fear, and recovery. A question that has followed the healing practices far beyond the walls of the room: what counts as medicine? Is healing only something that happens in hospitals or laboratories, or can it also live in a plant grown in a grandmother’s garden, a prayer whispered by a benzedeira or a ritual passed from one generation to another?

Across Brazil, medicinal traditions of healing have developed through Indigenous knowledge, African diasporic practices, European fold customs, faith, and the county’s extraordinary natural environment. All contributing to reveal that medicine can be more than the treatment of the body, but also a way of remembering who we are and how to care for one another.

There is No Single Brazilian Traditional Medicine

The assumption that Brazilian traditional medicine is one unified practice would miss what makes it so different to the rest of the world. Brazil’s healing traditions developed across an enormous country inhabited by diverse populations of people, environments, religion, and history.

Long before Portuguese colonization, Indigenous peoples had already developed sophisticated knowledge of the plants and ecosystems around them. A recent review of research on Jê Indigenous peoples alone identified 609 plant species managed for food and medicinal purposes. Through Colonization new andoften violent additions were made to this history. Portuguese settlers brought European remedies, catholicism, and folk practices, while enslaved Africans carried knowledge of healing, spirituality, and plants across the Atlantic. Over generations, practices were preserved, adapted, exchanged and sometimes blended. Brazil inherited something closer to a mosaic when it came to their understanding of what it means to heal, put together by the diverse communities inhabiting its lands.

Traditional Healing in Brazil

The knowledge contained in these plants is dependent on the people who use them. One of the most recognizable figures in Brazil is the benzedeira (benzedor for men), traditionally a woman who performs benzeção (blessings) that combine spoken prayers, gestures, and sometimes medicinal plants. The knowledge is often passed down orally within families. A recent study in Minas Gerais found that patients did not see visiting a benzedeira and a doctor as contradictory; for some Brazilians, both forms exist alongside one another.

There are more tangible remedies. Garrafadas are bottled preparations typically made by combining medical plants, roots, or bark, often in an alcoholic liquid. They are used for a wide range of purposes in Brazilian folk medicine. Plants sometimes take meanings beyond their chemical properties. In Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda, leaves may be used in teas, herbal baths, ritual washing, and cleansings with smoke. Another tradition continues is parteiras tradicionais or traditionalmidwives. To this day they assist with births in rural, riverine, forest, Indigenous, and quilombola communities in the north and northeast parts of Brazil.

Traditional plant medicine has even entered modern Brazilian public Healthcare. The O Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS) maintains policies for medicinal plants and phytotherapy, and twelve herbal medicines are currently included in Brazil’s national essential medicines system. These include Brazilian medicinal plants such as guaco, espinheira santa, and aroeira.

Brazilian traditional medicine is not any single remedy, but the act of passing down knowledge. A prayer remembered, a plant recognized, a technique taught from one pair of hands to another. Each piece of knowledge becomes a small inheritance. These traditions are traces of people who were sick, cared for, and carried that memory for generations to come.