According to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or NEH, has a funding rate of 7 percent.

It is the nation’s most prestigious humanities scholarship and has just been secured by the University of Iowa’s Mariola Espinosa, an associate professor of history.

“It’s one of those things that you dream of as a historian,” she said.

Espinosa was awarded $60,000 to write a book detailing the development of medicine in Puerto Rico. The book will focus on reactions surrounding asuerotherapy, a therapy technique that became popular in Spanish-speaking countries in 1929.

The roots of Espinosa’s research unofficially began when she came across a fundraiser for a condition called trigeminal neuralgia, a condition that causes intense pain similar to an electric shock on one side of the face.

“It reminded me of the fact that my dad used to sing a song to my grandfather, a song about the trigeminal nerve, because my grandfather had trigeminal neuralgia,” Espinosa said.

Espinosa went down a rabbit hole trying to find this particular song.

“I didn’t find that song, but I found other songs around the trigeminal nerve and about touching the trigeminal nerve,” she said. “And they were all about this Spanish doctor, or about people who would go see this Spanish doctor in 1929 who became, as I found later in my research, a sensation throughout the Spanish-speaking world.”

The doctor was Fernando Asuero, and it was said his therapy, later coined asuerotherapy, could cure ailments ranging from arthritis, chronic pain, paralysis, and blindness.

The procedure itself relied on touching traditional nerves, only accessible through sticking a metal rod up the patient’s nose.

“I wanted to know, why is it that people all over in some places in Latin America find an appealing phenomenon, like, why does it become famous in Argentina? Why does it become famous, and why does it generate music and theater? I even found plays,” she said.

Espinosa’s research has evolved to focus less on the doctor himself, leaning more into reactions around asuerotherapy, but the work remains deeply personal to her.

“I’m from Puerto Rico,” she said. “What happened is that I went to find out if this guy made it to the island. And I don’t think he did, but doctors in Puerto Rico picked up the method, and so I wanted to see what they were doing and how they reacted, and that’s where I found the story.”

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Assistant Professor Viridiana Hernández Fernández said Espinosa is more than deserving of the award.

“I was personally thrilled to hear the news because I feel incredibly fortunate to work alongside brilliant colleagues,” she said. “Mariola in particular, she’s always dedicated to fostering students’ growth and supporting the career development of her colleagues, myself included.”

To Fernández, equally as important as Espinosa’s character is the research itself.

“Mariola’s project is very important in the academic debate because she’s rescuing the history of scientific knowledge in the context of Latin America, in general, but also in the context of the Caribbean,” she said.

Fernández believes Mariola’s work will help invert the preconception that scientific innovation cannot come from countries seen as less developed.

History Department Chair Colin Gordon shared the same interest in the subject matter of the research.

“Puerto Rico is a really interesting case because, in some respects, it’s part of Latin American and Caribbean history, but in some respects it’s part of American history,” he said. “One of the real interesting elements of her work is that it pulls those together.”

Gordon noted how prestigious the NEH grant is and its recognition of the hard work the recipients go through.

“These grant panels are rough. They’re looking for reasons to say no. They have to get a big pile of applications down to the ones they’re going to fund. And so it’s a real achievement to impress them the first time around,” he said.