Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective ed. by Margaret E. Boyle and Sarah E. Owens

Abstract

Reviewed by: Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective ed. by Margaret E. Boyle and Sarah E. Owens Jean Dangler Boyle, Margaret E., and Sarah E. Owens, editors. Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective. U of Toronto P, 2021. Pp. 268. ISBN 978-1-4875-0518-9. This excellent collection of essays, titled Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective, aims to shed new light on the roles of women and gender in health and healing in the early modern Iberian world from 1500 to 1800. Many readers will be familiar with this broad theme, but maybe not as it relates to the book’s inclusive lens, which encompasses the Iberian Peninsula and colonial Latin America. The editors state in the introduction that they seek to bring into dialogue healing practices from indigenous, continental Iberian, and African contexts, a goal that emerges as one of the volume’s many strengths. They further underscore the need to move beyond a series of narrow assumptions about early modern women and gender, such as the model of the healer-witch and women’s restricted social role as mothers. The volume covers topics from a range of areas and disciplines. It consists of an introduction and ten essays, which are divided into three sections: “Treatment Models” (four essays), “Representing Health” (three), and “Faith and Illness” (three). In the introduction, the editors situate the volume in the trajectory of recent work on the links between the humanities and narrative medicine, and of questions about health that arise in today’s continuing global pandemic. However, deeper engagement with these connections will have to be taken up elsewhere. The book’s more focused framework includes recent transatlantic approaches to science and medicine, and to women and gender, as well as the importance of studying gender with attention to women and men, as opposed to centering only on women, or on individual women as exceptional. This more ample approach makes the book a welcome addition to recent scholarly trends. The first essay is the outstanding critical case study, “Healing across Ideological Boundaries in Late Seventeenth-Century Madrid,” by Carolin Schmitz and María Luz López-Terrada, who explore the biography of María Sánchez de la Rosa, a healer in late seventeenth-century Madrid. The historical record demonstrates Sánchez de la Rosa’s expertise and renown, although it also shows the fragility and transitory qualities of women’s work, since the legal accusations and trials against her ultimately led to the demise of her reputation. In “Killer Skin Care: Gender and Venereal Disease Experiences in Colonial Lima,” Kathleen M. Kole de Peralta examines women’s treatment of venereal disease (bubas) in sixteenth-century Lima. Kole de Peralta’s superb work confirms previous findings that portray women’s healing as dangerous when occurring outside men’s control. Sarah E. Owens’s thought-provoking “Convent Medicine, Healing, and Hierarchy in Arequipa, Peru” illuminates the power struggles that ensued between male physicians who were assigned to late eighteenth-century convents and the indigenous and African women healers whom patients often preferred. The chapter also examines the European medicines and indigenous foods that were used in healing practice. Karen Stolley’s provocative “Leche and lagartijas: Injecting the Local into Eighteenth-Century Spanish American Medical Discourse” explores two substances, milk and lizards, to show how medical practices were managed in eighteenth-century Latin America. Lizards were used by indigenous cultures in the cure of cancer, inflammation, and ulcers, becoming part of what Stolley calls the “transatlantic pharmacopeia.” [End Page 458] Part two opens with Emily Colbert Cairns’s “Breastfeeding in Public? Representations of Breastfeeding in Early Modern Spain.” Colbert Cairns studies how, much like the present, representations of lactation from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century depict women’s bodies as “open to public debate” (116), and as further mediating larger social problems of racial purity, patriarchal control, and lineage. Sherry Velasco’s “The Queer (Evil) eye and Deviant Healing on the Early Modern Stage” explores the ways in which an entremés shifts the focus of the traditional blame for the mal de...