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The importance that Simón Bolívar attached to war medicine is undeniable. His decrees and provisions to improve the health situation on the battlefields demonstrate this. However, he neglected his personal health, and his relationship with doctors and medicine is contradictory. Luis Perú de Lacroix reports in the Diario de Bucaramanga some facts that confirm the above. Once Bolívar was indisposed with “a heavy stomach and a great headache.” Dr. Moor, his doctor, prescribed an emetic emetic and tartar. Bolívar did not comply with these recommendations, and claimed: “…I don’t want drugs from the apothecary…doctors are like bishops; those give prescriptions, and these always give blessings, even though they know that those who give them don’t want them or make fun of them.” The next day Bolívar felt fine and said that if he had taken what the doctor had indicated “perhaps he would now have a mixed mood and a strong fever.”
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On another occasion he spoke regarding wine: “It is one of the most useful natural productions for man that, taken in moderation, strengthens the stomach and the entire machine.” He later criticized the consumption of butter “for being bilious and very harmful…”.
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On another occasion, he expressed his sympathy for physiological idealism, a 19th-century medical theory that overestimated the dependence of the content of sensations on the activity of the sense organs: “Man has a material body and an intelligence represented by the brain…intelligence is a secretion of the brain.”
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During the Passage through the Andes (1819), Bolívar acted as a doctor to relieve his soldiers of the suffering caused by low temperatures, according to Víctor Manuel Ovalles. Bolívar ordered his soldiers to be flogged with broom branches. In addition, he had hot papelón guarapo prepared with ginger. Ovallles says: “The Liberator had used the method of treatment used by the ancients to awaken sensitivity by means of flagellation with twigs. And he used the heat, the stimulating action of ginger and the calories of papelón to make react those organisms numb by cold”
During that same icy journey, Bolívar treated his headache by causing another pain. Ovalles writes: “But without wasting time he put the testes in a brandy gourd, which produces a lot of burning in the scrotum, causing an effective diversion.” This peculiar treatment is currently explained with the physiological theory of pain called “gate control”. In popular jargon: one nail drives another nail.