Marvels of Medicine

Literature and Scientific Enquiry in Early Colonial Spanish America

Yarí Pérez Marín (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

200 Seiten

2023
Liverpool University Press (Verlag)
978-1-83764-421-6 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

Marvels of Medicine makes a compelling case for including sixteenth century medical and surgical writing in the critical frameworks we now use to think about a genealogy of cultural expression in Latin America. Focusing on a small group of practitioners who differed in their levels of training, but who shared the common experience of having left Spain to join colonial societies in the making, this book analyses the paths their texts charted to attitudes and political positions that would come to characterize a criollo mode of enunciation. Unlike the accounts of first explorers, which sought to amaze audiences back in Europe with descriptions of strange and astonishing lands, these texts instead engaged the marvellous in an effort to supersede it, stressing the value of sensorial experience and of verifying information through repetition and demonstration. Vernacular medical writing became an unlikely early platform for a new form of regionally anchored discourse that demanded participation in a global intellectual conversation, yet found itself increasingly relegated to the margins. In responding to that challenge, anatomical treatises, natural histories and surgical manuals exceeded the bounds set by earlier templates becoming rich, hybrid narratives that were as concerned with science as with portraying the lives and sensibilities of women and men in early colonial Mexico.

Yarí Pérez Marín is Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University.

Introduction
Medical books and colonial Latin American literature

Chapter 1
The surgeon’s secrets: the medical travel narrative of Pedro Arias de Benavides

Chapter 2
Irreconcilable differences?: anatomy, physiology and the New World body

Chapter 3
Weakening the sex: the medicalization of female gender identity in New Spain

Chapter 4
Contested medical knowledge and regional self-fashioning

Conclusion

Epilogue

Works cited

Erscheinungsdatum	03.10.2023
Reihe/Serie	Liverpool Latin American Studies ; 21
Zusatzinfo	12 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	Liverpool
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Studium ► Querschnittsbereiche ► Geschichte / Ethik der Medizin
	Sozialwissenschaften
ISBN-10	1-83764-421-7 / 1837644217
ISBN-13	978-1-83764-421-6 / 9781837644216
Zustand	Neuware