ve. She couldn’t shake it back to life. Finally the hand became so paralyzed “it looked like it was dead.” She stopped teaching. She loved to sew, loved working with her hands, but couldn’t. Frontier society demanded that everyone live traditional lives and carry their load. Unmarried, and in her late teens, Lorenzana had become useless.
Father José Sánchez brought her to San Diego Mission. “He took me in,” she says. “I could not move my hand at all for about two years and eight months. Then, over a period of about four months my hand began to recover very slowly.”
During those three years, she began nursing the sick in the mission hospital, her left arm in a sling. Also at this time, if not sooner, Lorenzana made a choice. Given the turmoil of being uprooted, shipped from a major city to a forlorn frontier, losing her mother, and leaving the Carrillos and Mercados, Lorenzana fully embraced the one family that would never abandon her: the Church.
When she began nursing, Father Sánchez ordered her not to practice medicine, just “teach servants how to and supervise them.” But without official sanction, Lorenzana “always, as best I could, attended the sick.”
This was often done without medical supplies. After 1810, cargo ships from Mexico became fewer and fewer. Of necessity, Lorenzana learned native healing techniques: herbal remedies for headaches and fevers, potions for snakebite, salves for wounds. She doesn’t mention it, but a curandera also used prayer and ritual, like a shaman, to exorcise spiritual illnesses — among them “shock,” “fright,” and the “evil eye” — caused, it was said, by curses, demons, or lost, malevolent spirits.
When Lorenzana regained use of her hand, she returned to the home of Josefa Sal, whose husband, Sergeant Mercado, died in 1811. Josefa opened a school for girls at the Presidio, but since she also owned a garden and an orchard down the hill, she turned teaching duties over to Lorenzana. Over 40 years later, when she dictated her memoirs to Thomas Savage, Lorenzana recalled her students with fondness: “I taught Ignacio Martinez’s three daughters, and Tomasa Lugo’s niece…. Many other girls learned their first letters and other things from me.”