Happy Birthday, Josefina

Josefina's birthday is coming up, but the really important part of the story deals with Josefina's relationship with Tia Magdalena, who is her godmother and a healer.

( In other cultures she would have been referred to as a "wise woman," someone who knew about various herbs and materials that could be used for healing people's illnesses. Such people were present throughout history in various societies. In Native American society they would have been referred to as medicine men and medicine women.)

(In much older times such women were the only actual healers in the societies, as the "doctors" of the time were really men who had very little actual knowledge of medicine and healing, believing that "bleeding a person," (using leeches to drain blood from a person or even cutting a person's arm to let out blood), would cure the person's ills since it was "bad blood" that was making them sick.)

(The wise women knew better, though, and they did the real healing in the community. The male doctors of the time, in Europe, hated these women since they were competition (and they were actually doing real healing, not the fake stuff the male doctors were doing), and this is one of the reasons, although not the main one, that many women ended up being accused of being witches and were executed.)

Anyhow, Josefina breaks something that belongs to Tia and runs away. Still, she wants to be a healer and is given a chance to show her abilities when a friend of hers is bitten by a rattlesnake. Things work out well and Josefina now knows what she wants to be when she grows up.

The historical section talks about babies, children, and the types of work children did at the time.

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