José Gregorio Hernández

This Element explores how Venezuelan physician-saint José Gregorio Hernández has become a central figure through whom Venezuelans interpret illness, morality, and nationhood amid enduring crisis. Following his path from an Andean pharmacy to Parisian laboratories, Carthusian monasteries, and Caracas wards through to his canonisation, it argues that Hernández unites scientific modernity with popular Catholic devotion within a fragile postcolonial context. Using an interdisciplinary lens, this Element examines how patients, clinicians, spiritist mediums, and politicians invoke his image to navigate institutional collapse, spiritual resilience, and competing visions of nation-building. Tracking his presence across hospitals, home altars, María Lionza's spirit courts, and the pilgrimage site of Isnotú, these spaces form a vernacular archive of Venezuelan care and suffering. The Element concludes that appeals to Hernández complement rather than reject biomedicine, reframing clinical encounters through the lenses of justice, moral responsibility, and solidarity - offering a distinctive Global South perspective for contemporary Health Humanities.