Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective (Toronto Iberic)

"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."-- Provided by publisher Dedication 6 Contents 8 List of Illustrations and Tables 10 Acknowledgments 12 Introduction: Why Gendered Health and Healing? • Margaret E. Boyle and Sarah E. Owens 16 Part One: Treatment Models 32 1 Healing across Ideological Boundaries in Late Seventeenth-Century Madrid • Carolin Schmitz and Maríaluz López-Terrada 34 2 Killer Skin Care: Gender and Venereal Disease Experiences in Colonial Lima • Kathleen M. Kole de Peralta 65 3 Convent Medicine, Healing, and Hierarchy in Arequipa, Peru • Sarah E. Owens 82 4 Leche and lagartijas: Injecting the Local into Eighteenth-Century Spanish American Medical Discourse • Karen Stolley 100 Part Two: Representing Health 120 5 Breastfeeding in Public? Representations of Breastfeeding in Early Modern Spain • Emily Colbert Cairns 122 6 The Queer (Evil) Eye and Deviant Healing on the Early Modern Stage • Sherry Velasco 149 7 Staging Women’s Healing: Theory and Practice • Margaret E. Boyle 167 Part Three: Faith and Illness 186 8 Work and Health in the Jesuit Province of Aragon (1617–1667) • Patricia W. Manning 188 9 Chronicles of Pain: Carmelite Women and Galenism • Bárbara Mujica 208 10 Sacred Embryology: Intrauterine Baptisms and the Negotiation of Theology and Health Sciences across the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire • George A. Klaeren 232 List of Contributors 254 Index 258