Main description:

Recognizing the variety of health experiences across geographical borders, Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World interrogates the concepts of "health" and "healing" between 1500 and 1800. Through an interdisciplinary approach to medical history, gender history, and the literature and culture of the early modern Atlantic World, this collection of essays points to the ways in which the practice of medicine, the delivery of healthcare, and the experiences of disease and health are gendered.

The contributors explore how the medical profession sought to exert its power over patients, determining standards that impacted conceptions of self and body, and at the same time, how this influence was mediated. Using a range of sources, the essays reveal the multiple and sometimes contradictory ways that early modern health discourse intersected with gender and sexuality, as well as its ties to interconnected ethical, racial, and class-driven concerns. Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World breaks new ground through its systematic focus on gender and sexuality as they relate to the delivery of healthcare, the practice of medicine, and the experiences of health and healing across early modern Spain and colonial Latin America.

Contents:

List of Illustrations and Tables
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Why Gendered Health and Healing?
Margaret E. Boyle, Bowdoin College
Sarah E. Owens, College of Charleston

Part One: Treatment Models

1. Healing across Ideological Boundaries in Late Seventeenth-Century Madrid
Carolin Schmitz, University of Cambridge
Marialuz Lopez-Terrada, CSIC-Universitat Politecnica de Valencia

2. Killer Skin Care: Gender and Venereal Disease Experiences in Colonial Lima
Kathleen M. Kole de Peralta, Idaho State University

3. Convent Medicine, Healing, and Hierarchy in Arequipa, Peru
Sarah E. Owens, College of Charleston

4. Leche and lagartijas: Injecting the Local into Eighteenth-Century Spanish American Medical Discourse
Karen Stolley, Emory University

Part Two: Representing Health

5. Breastfeeding in Public? Representations of Breastfeeding in Early Modern Spain
Emily Colbert Cairns, Salve Regina University

6. The Queer (Evil) Eye and Deviant Healing on the Early Modern Stage
Sherry Velasco, University of Southern California

7. Staging Women's Healing: Theory and Practice
Margaret E. Boyle, Bowdoin College

Part Three: Faith and Illness

8. Work and Health in the Jesuit Province of Aragon (1617-1667)
Patricia W. Manning, University of Kansas

9. Chronicles of Pain: Carmelite Women and Galenism
Barbara Mujica, Georgetown University

10. Sacred Embryology: Intrauterine Baptisms and the Negotiation of Theology and Health Sciences across the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire
George A. Klaeren, University of Oxford

List of Contributors
Index