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Diagnosing empire: refiguring disease in the early modern Hispanic world |
[Ph.D. dissertation].United States -- Pennsylvania : University of Pennsylvania; 2006. Publication Number: AAT 3246201.- 284 p. |
During the early modern period, medical discourse and practice reflected the
changing political and social climate of the emerging Spanish empire. Both
political and literary authors employed these concepts as critical tools in
examining the health of their society. The popular use of body imagery to refer
to the State and its members allowed political writers to somatize the dangers
of potentially "contagious" members of society such as women, Jews, Moors,
recent converts, the newly conquered populations of the New World. These
subaltern figures were viewed as physically deficient beings in an effort to
legitimize their marginalization or expulsion from the empire. My thesis
examines how authors of literature take a different view toward subaltern
alterity through their allusions to contemporary medicine and through their
creation of successful subaltern healer figures. As figures that could harm the
political and medical good of the society, any subaltern who practiced medicine
experienced difficulties in treating members outside of his/her race or gender.
These practitioners were limited and policed by imperial legislation and the
Royal Medical Tribunal, the Protomedicato. Furthermore, medical, political, and
literary authors often likened these healers to agents of mobile contagion that
could infect as many as they cured. In the dissertation, I argue that authors
such as Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the anonymous author of the Viaje de
Turquia, Francisco Delicado, and Miguel de Cervantes recognized the subversive
potential of subaltern medical practitioners to diagnose and critique the
Spanish Empire. By validating the illegitimate practices of subaltern healers
both within the borders of the empire and in the territory of the Other, these
authors questioned the very structure of the imperial hierarchies of power.
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MCINNIS-DOMINGUEZ, Meghan
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Méd. temps modernes : médecine et société, Méd. temps modernes : biobibliographie
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fiche entrée le 21/12/2007
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Nombre de réponses :
1
1-1
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