Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire ed. by Slater, John, Maríaluz López-Terrada, and José Pardo-Tomás (review)

Whilst there was some consistency of structural authority, stemming from the King, the Spanish Empire was by no means hegemonic. Medicine was ostensibly ordered from the centre, but in reality, local custom and negotiation with different authorities resulted in a medical hierarchy which was the product of negotiation rather than regal edict. It is against this background that this collection of essays explores medical cultures of the Empire in the early-modern period.

The volume does not cover the whole geographic span of the early modern Spanish Empire; furthermore, the essays cover mostly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, a significant point about this book, set out in the introduction, is that ‘readers may be surprised to find that academic medicine is not the predominant voice in this volume’ (p. 7); rather, the contributors have drawn on a diversity of interdisciplinary sources not normally encountered in a work of this genre, in order to shed light on medical cultures.

Part One comprises three chapters which are concerned with ‘New Spain’, the Americas. Angélica Morales Sarabia focuses on the use of peyote and other hallucinogenic herbs, which, perhaps inevitably, became associated with witchcraft, causing offence to Spanish religious authorities. José Pardo-Tomás is concerned with native mortality as recorded in a collection of texts from the middle of the sixteenth century collectively known as Relaciones geográphicas de Indias. They comprised the responses gathered in Mexico to a standard questionnaire developed to provide detailed information on the conquered territories. The data included demography and the nature of diseases which affected the inhabitants, and the remedies they employed (p. 43). Ralph Bauer aligns the well-known materia medica of physician and natural historian Nicolás Monardes with Renaissance alchemy.

In Part Two, the source material is letters, which as Mauricio Sánchez-Menchero points out, give an intimacy which official documents do not (p. 93). He is concerned with transatlantic correspondence. Letters ‘help us assess medical phenomena related to three concepts: distance, scale and novelty’ (p. 92). The first section considers the hazards of the journey from Spain to New Spain (Mexico). In addition to the prospect of disease during the transatlantic crossing, there was the impact of illness encountered on landing and travelling inland. He then turns to the paucity of medical help available from physicians, surgeons and apothecaries, once travellers had reached their destination. Practitioners from the Old World relied on the same Galenic methods they took with them, and which migrants would have expected to be employed. This chapter then turns to the matter of epidemics, which affected the indigenous population more than the Spanish. M. A. Katritzky focuses on the hypertrichosis, excessive hair growth, which affected Pedro Gonzales, ‘The Wild Man of Tenerife’. The condition of Gonzales, who was born in the Canaries, also occurred in his children and grandchildren. Like the satyrs of the classical world and the medieval tradition of wild men, the Gonzales family belonged to the class of ‘marvellous races’ (p. 115), and was moved around various courts of Europe. Elisa Andretta’s contribution is based on the time spent by the humanist and historian Juan Páez de Castro in Trent and Rome and in particular his 1545–52 correspondence with historian Jerónimo Zurita. Both subsequently returned to Spain to occupy significant court positions. Whilst neither was medically trained, both took an active interest in medicine and natural history, and were in contact with high profile physicians in Italy. The author points out that this resulted in a new medical culture that extended beyond Italy into other parts of the Spanish empire (p. 144).

Part Three explores literary and theatrical influences on Spanish medicine. Enrique García Santo-Tomás examines the place of...