Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective

Abstract

Margaret E. Boyle and Sarah E. Owens's edited volume offers us a peek into the hospitals, homes, and medicine cabinets of the early modern Iberian world to examine the concepts of health and healing from a gendered perspective. The book consists of an introduction and ten essays that cover several geographical settings in Spain and Latin America from the early 1500s to the late 1800s. The work is also broad in its interdisciplinary approach; it draws from fields as diverse as the history of medicine, literature, and theater studies. Taken together, the fine-grain historical studies remind us that the practice of medicine and health care, along with the experience of health and disease, is decidedly gendered. The book offers two main correctives to the literature on early modern and colonial science. It highlights the important role of Spanish and Spanish American women in medicine, health, and healing. It also challenges the conventional Eurocentric history of the New World by focusing on the agency of creole and Indigenous practitioners. (In 2021—when the book was published—one cannot help wondering why we are still having to prove that women and Latin America matter!) Organized by theme, the book provides an impressive overview of a wide range of topics. As with all edited volumes, certain essays will appeal to individual readers more than others.The first section, “Treatment Models,” looks at Spain, Mexico, and Peru to demonstrate one of the main themes of the book: “that medicine was largely the same from place to place, whether in the imperial metropolis or in the American territories” (p. 9). An interesting essay by Carolin Schmitz and Maríaluz López-Terrada puts women front and center by examining the life, training, and healing practices of María Sánchez de la Rosa, a prominent healer in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Madrid. Women's relation to male-dominated spaces is also one of the book's underlying themes. Kathleen M. Kole de Peralta, for instance, looks at gender, sex, and the treatment of venereal diseases in sixteenth-century Lima, Peru, to show how women were less likely than men to be hospitalized for these ailments because they feared that they would be branded as promiscuous. An essay by Sarah Owens in this same section examines the medicinal remedies found in three convents in Arequipa, Peru, to focus on a wide range of issues related to health and healing. One of Owens's many findings is that convents in Arequipa relied mainly on European medicine but also incorporated some Indigenous influences, especially when it came to American foods such as quinoa, chocolate, ají, and chuño. The final essay in this section, by Karen Stolley, drives home the point that healers in the Americas were not mere consumers of Spanish medical thinking and practices; instead, creole practitioners engaged in negotiations between local and imperial infrastructures and belief systems. As in all sections of the book, these essays draw on a diverse array of sources, from newspaper articles and convent ledgers to criminal court proceedings.The volume then turns to “Representing Health,” a section that analyzes visual, theatrical, and textual depictions to illuminate health concerns and practices. Not surprisingly, breastfeeding features prominently in this section (and in other parts of the book). Emily Colbert Cairns's chapter looks at representations of breastfeeding in early modern Spain to argue that these images not only racialized wet nurses but also helped shape the notion that breast milk was an important part of maternal care. Playwrights similarly depicted gendered health issues, the subject of Sherry Velasco's piece on the phenomenon of the evil eye in theater. Margaret Boyle's essay on representations of gendered health issues and female medical practitioners in theatrical works rounds out this section with a look at the works of Spanish dramatist Tirso de Molina.The final section of the book, “Faith and Illness,” focuses on health, gender, and religion. Patricia Manning examines the health care of the Jesuits in Aragon, Spain, to show how this religious order placed emphasis on keeping the priests and brothers healthy so that they could carry out their work. Bárbara Mujica's interesting essay looks at how Carmelite nuns embraced illness as a way to imitate Christ's suffering and therefore get closer to God. These two chapters do an excellent job of highlighting how male and female orders had differing views on health and health care. A final chapter, by George Klaeren, focuses on eighteenth-century Hispanic obstetrics and “sacred embryology,” a field that was part of medico-moralism—an early form of bioethics or medical ethics. Klaeren analyzes debates about intrauterine baptisms, the baptisms of a fetus within a uterus, to delve into gendered implications of pregnancy.Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World covers much ground with lucid and fascinating essays that are free of jargon. While the book has a comprehensive introduction, it lacks a formal conclusion to pull together all the rich material. Nevertheless, it makes significant contributions to several fields—including the history of medicine, women, and gender as well as feminist, disability, and Iberian studies—and should be of interest to a wide range of students and scholars.