Silvia Valero / Emiro Santos García: Manuel Zapata Olivella. Hacia una medicina nacional en el Pacífico colombiano. Cartagena de Indias: Universidad de Cartagena / Laboratorio Editorial CILA 2023. 294 páginas.

[Autom. eng. transl.] Manuel Zapata O vella, a writer and at the same time a doctor, begins to write what after a long work will be the novel La maraca bewitched by jibaná. As Silvia Valero explains in the introduction to the Manuel Zapata Olivella volume. Towards a national medicine in the Colombian Pacific (University of Cartagena, 2023), the idea of ​​this novel is glimpsed in several of the projects that Zapata Olivella develops over almost twenty years. The genesis would lie in the trips that the writer carried out in the Colombian department of Chocó throughout the 1940s and 1950s. In particular, it would be during his second trip when Zapata Olivella (who at that time supported himself financially by practicing as a doctor) began to conceptualize the idea of ​​a “national medicine” that would allow him to make the black and indigenous cultural context more fully known with the objective of finding a way that allows the ancestral knowledge of these communities to collaborate and dialogue with scientific knowledge.