Fictions of Well-Being: Sickly Readers and Vernacular Medical Writing in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain (review)

In this discussion of late medieval and early modern Spanish vernacular medical treatises, Michael Solomon examines how writers carefully established claims to medical expertise even while they stressed the accessibility of their texts. Thus, Mártinez de Castrillo’s work on dentistry (1557, rev. 1570) was subtitled a ‘brief and compendious treatise’ (p. 24). This is, ironically, also an adequate description of Professor Solomon’s own monograph – a deceptively short, 97-page text (helpful endnotes excluded), founded on extensive, well-digested research, witnessed by a 51-page bibliography, of which two thirds is devoted to ‘Vernacular Medical Works, 1305–1650’. Solomon lucidly discusses the emergence of vernacular texts on medical conditions and their prevention or cure in Spain, and the novel practice of ‘sickly reading’ by nonspecialist readers – increasingly self-conscious ‘communities of medicalized subjects’ (p. 96), who both responded to, and provided the continued demand for, such texts.

Three well-organized chapters focus on the self-proclaimed ‘Utility’ of medical texts, the author–physician’s self-construction, and the popularized discourse of pharmaceutical remedies – the latter commodifying treatment as a ‘tangible’ thing for increasingly consumerist ‘sickly readers’ (pp. 77–80). The monograph culminates with Solomon’s compelling conclusions about the literature’s social and cultural effects upon its non-specialist readers.

Solomon explores evolving attitudes about the dissemination of medical knowledge. Galenic belief in the benefits of positive thinking, he explains, justified strategies of mystification, self-praise, and downright deception needed to elicit the patient’s trust in the physician’s qualifications and expertise, and the patient’s faith in the possibility of recovery. This Galenic tradition, in turn, underpinned the rationale of vernacular author–physicians to promote their writings while creating for their readers ‘a healing strategy’ (p. 9), a process whereby the author–physician’s claims to ‘reputation’ were in the interest of the reader–patient, in conformity with traditional medical practice.

Solomon also highlights fictional characteristics of these works, namely an epic rhetoric of ‘heroic metaphors’, whereby the self-invested knightly physicians contrasted their wisdom, exemplary record, and moral excellence with the shortcomings of demonized ‘mad’ or ‘foolish’ doctors, variously denounced as ‘incompetent, immoral, deceiving’, and even ‘evil’ (p. 65).

Throughout, Solomon highlights parallels between early modern ‘sickly reading’ and modern-day medical marketing, and consumerist attitudes toward health and the body – for instance, even, at the extreme, the notion of self-treatment is analogous with modern-day self-help health literature; similarly, the vernacular medical writers’ emphasis on brevity and simplicity resembles ‘the “fast relief ” promises used to advertise modern-day pain relievers’ (p. 23). In his conclusion, Solomon takes this further, convincingly proposing that, in cultivating an audience – a ‘collaborative and collective’ community of readers and listeners (p. 10) – author–physicians oversaw the emergence of ‘medicalized subjects’ (p. 96) who not only thought of diseases more scientifically, rather than as ‘undesirable symptoms’ or ‘localized pains’ (p. 95), but also became avid consumers of popular medical literature. This, arguably, not only – or not so much – provided relief through knowledge, but, conversely – like today’s internet-facilitated ‘Cyberchondria’ (pp. 92–93) – caused ‘anxiety and produc[ed] sensations of ill-being’ (pp. 93–94).

Solomon’s book illustrates well-structured, insightful, and carefully researched scholarly writing at its best.