From body to community: Venereal disease and society in baroque Spain. By Cristian Berco

Abstract

Studies about medicine in early modern Spain have tended to focus on concepts or ideas proper to academic medicine that often had little bearing on patients’ experience of health, sickness, and the wide range of therapeutic options that were available to them. This meant that the objects of the history of medicine were traditionally the development of medical sciences, the forms these sciences took in the past, and the slow process of advancement toward modern medicine. This approach tended to overlook that health and sickness, as well as the attempts to alleviate suffering and cure diseases, were experiences shared by an entire culture or society (whether or not access to academic medicine was widely available or affordable).