Health and Medicine in Hapsburg Spain: Agents, Practices, Representations (review)

This volume on the medical history of early modern Spain provides one more piece in an emerging picture of science and medicine in Spain and the Spanish Empire that is becoming increasingly available to the Anglophone world. As Harold J. Cook points out in his informative introduction, there has been much Spanish-language publication with regard to the history of science and medicine in Spain, but very little of it has been translated into English, and few Anglophone scholars in the field have emphasized the need to learn Spanish. These logistic trends underscore—and have been reinforced by—a centuries-long tradition of polarization between the English, Protestant world and that of Catholic Spain, the former associated with capitalism, incipient democracy, and an open, inquiring scientific spirit, the latter with despotism, orthodoxy, and a stifling of science. The last decade has seen a growing trend among Anglophone scholars to lay this "Black Legend" to rest, emphasizing Spain's pioneering work in the Scientific Revolution and the importance of its American dominions in promoting a spirit of inquiry, a sense of historicism, and an evidence-based, empirical epistemology.¹ These works have tended to emphasize scientific themes, however, so that "the history of science in Spain and the Spanish empire is currently far better known" than that of medicine (p. 3). This book, the product of a 2006 conference organized by the Wellcome Trust Centre on medicine in early modern Spain, thus aims to remedy these trends in two ways. First, it brings greater knowledge of early modern Spanish medicine to the Anglophone world, and second, it shows that Spanish medicine was very much tied to developments elsewhere in Europe, confirming "just how much Spain was a part of the common history of Europe in the early modern period" (p. 3).

The essays in the volume touch on a wide variety of issues and new directions in history of medicine from professional regulation to medical alchemy to ethics, written by scholars in history of medicine, history of witchcraft, and literature. Maria Luz Lopez Terrada and Mar Rey Bueno both emphasize Philip II's forward-thinking policies with regard to medical regulation and medical alchemy. He not only appointed a known Paracelsian as Protomedico (chief medical officer) in Valencia, but also funded the establishment of vast laboratories and botanical gardens in his palaces to promote a very rational research program in chemical medicine. By contrast, Jon Arrizabalaga examines the writings of a strong anti-Paracelsian doctor, Rodrigo de Castro, a Sephardic Jew who migrated to Hamburg in the 1590s. Castro's portrait of the ideal practitioner, a Galenist trained in the Scholastic-Arab tradition typical of the University of Salamanca, was decidedly traditionalist but nonetheless provided an important precedent for setting up a program of medical ethics and etiquette in the early modern world. Teresa Huguet-Termes returns to the theme of rationality in discussing hospital reform in Madrid during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In tracing the process of the consolidation of most of Madrid's many hospitals into one General Hospital, she is able to show how Baroque demonstrations of charity through medical care served to promote the image of royal power. Finally, the essays by María Taussiet and Mónica Bolufer examine gendered discourses in Spanish medicine and demonstrate the ways that these discourses began to change in the eighteenth century. Taussiet describes the saludadores, men thought to have special powers to detect those who had been bewitched and identify the perpetrators, who began to diminish in importance with the decline of witchcraft accusations from the eighteenth century on. Bolufer shows the way that medical discourse on the differences between men and women shifted in the eighteenth century from arguments...