Y no con el lenguaje preciso de la ciencia. La ensayística de Gregorio Marañón en la entreguerra española (review)

The title of this book reflects an issue that was close to the heart of the Spanish endocrinologist, sexologist and historian of science, Gregorio Marañón. For Marañón, following in the steps of the problematic and contradictory legacy of the Enlightenment and by drawing on prominent thinkers such as Joaquín Costa and Ortega, science would resolve the problems that beset the Spanish nation. The kind of science envisaged by Marañón would not be any monolithic form of science, devoted to one end and with one story to tell. It would be a science that could respond to multiple social realities, preoccupations and objectives. The ‘truth’ of this science needed to be constantly revised in the light of new developments and social exigencies. In this way, Marañón, salvando las distancias, can be understood as a figure similar in his contribution to the scientific and social milieus as British figures such as J. B. S. Haldane and H. Ellis. Marañón would concur with Ortega’s notion of ‘Europe equalling science’ and it was to the scientific alleviation of social, personal and collective problems that Marañón dedicated his life.

Curiously, the figure of Marañón has not elicited the amount of scrutiny that he would deserve, not only in terms of his medical and sexological contribution but also as an intellectual figure in twentieth-century Spain. This may be due partly to Marañón’s critical approach to the Republic and his return to Spain after the end of the Civil War in 1942, a stance that would lead Pedro Laín Entralgo to describe him as ‘transpolítico y moral’ (29). Despite important work by, for example, Alejandra Ferrándiz, Thomas Glick, Gary Keller and, more recently, Sarah Wright, there is therefore still much to be written about his life and work. In this book Dagmar Vandebosch has made an important contribution to the analysis of the ideas, the social and scientific context and the contribution of Marañón to Spanish realities during the first half of the twentieth century.

Y no con el lenguaje preciso de la ciencia is composed of five principal chapters: an introduction; a chapter on Marañón’s contribution to endocrinology; a chapter on the ‘banquet of love’ and Marañon’s theories of sexuality; a chapter on science and homosexuality; and a chapter on Marañón as a historian of science. The introduction places Marañón and some aspects of his work within the genre of the essay as an artistic, cultural and, indeed, scientific mode of writing. The foreign and national expressions of the essay are understood as a new form (for the time) of making an intellectual contribution to the social questions of the period, coinciding in some respects with the ‘social novel’, but making a new contribution to the project of social reform and regeneration championed by the Generation of 1914. Vandebosch argues that what makes her study different from those authors mentioned above, with the exception of Wright, is her focus not on the content of the ensayística of Marañón as a contribution to the history of ideas as if there were a transparent relationship between the text faithfully reflecting the ideas of the author – but on the language used to express those ideas. The text is not studied as a mere vehicle for the transmission of ideas but as an interpretation of those ideas and of reality itself (32–33). This allows Vandebosch to focus on the dialogical relationship between text, expression, reality and the context of the interwar years during which Marañón wrote. This undertaking is mainly successful throughout this book, although Vandebosch does linger at times on the evaluation of Marañón’s thought as a contribution to the history of science and as a moral discourse. In this sense, the author’s division between ‘document...