Obra ressenyada: Teresa HUGUET-TERMES ; Jon ARRIZABALAGA and Harold J. COOK (eds.), Health and Medicine in Hapsburg Spain: Agents, Practices, Representations. Medical History, Supplement No. 29. London: The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2009

Slater, John

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Reseñas Dynamis 2014; 34 (1): 211-263216segundo de manuscritos citados (pp. 273-281). Una cuidada estructura, pues, en la que no se omiten las herramientas de acceso al contenido como por desgra-cia, por dejadez o erróneo criterio editorial, tantas veces ocurre.En suma, desde la investigación del más alto nivel que se produce actual-mente en Francia, la aportación de Laurence Moulinier-Brogi enriquece nuestro conocimiento de la medicina medieval y de sus textos doctrinales. Y ello parti-cularmente en un tema, la uroscopia, de gran importancia en la historia de la profesión médica —hasta el punto de determinar la imagen tópica del médico universitario—, situado en la intersección entre teoría y práctica y entre medici-na académica y medicina extrauniversitaria. Precisamente por ello, fue un tema que las misceláneas médicas 11 y los recetarios 12 no solían olvidar, como tampo-co la fascinación por la astrología como herramienta susceptible de facilitar la comprensión del ser humano y del binomio salud-enfermedad. œLluís Cifuentes i Comamala Universitat de BarcelonaTeresa Huguet-Termes; Jon Arrizabalaga and Harold J. Cook, eds. Health and Medicine in Hapsburg Spain: Agents, Practices, Representations. Medical History, Supplement No. 29. London: The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL; 2009, 158 p. ISBN 978-0-85484-128-8. $174,29.This book is an overview of current scholarship in the history of early modern Spanish medicine, meant for English-speaking readers who may be unaware of recent trends in Spanish historiography. As such, it brings together the work of six excellent historians, all of whom have contributed articles that are broad enough in scope to be accessible to historians of medicine with little knowledge  11. Pensado Figueiras, Jesús. El códice Zabálburu de medicina medieval: edición crítica y estudio de fuentes. Tesis doctoral de la Universidade da Coruña; 2013. 12. Cifuentes i Comamala, Lluís. El manuscrit del receptari de misser Joan. In: Mutgé Vives, Josefi-na; Salicrú i Lluch, Roser; Vela i Aulesa, Carles, eds. La Corona catalanoaragonesa, l’Islam i el món mediterrani: estudis d’història medieval en homenatge a la doctora María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol. Barcelona: CSIC; 2013, p. 155-167.ReseñasDynamis 2014; 34 (1): 211-263217of Spain. This said, readers already familiar with the scholarship of these historians will find the book valuable, too. The articles collected here deal both with the traditional objects of the history of medicine —hospitals, courtly cultures, and the institutions that controlled medical practice— as well as fields of inquiry that are sometimes overlooked or superficially explored as oddities, such as: the histories of charismatic healers and witches, the Sephardic Diaspora, and the querelle des femmes. While there have been significant efforts to bring the history of early modern Spanish medicine to wider notice recently, the focus of Health and Medicine in Hapsburg Spain is welcome and timely. Harold Cook begins his introduction with a statement that many readers of Dynamis will not dispute: «Although the history of medicine in Spain is flourishing, those who read English alone currently know too little about it». It is dispiriting that an introduction of this sort must begin by dispelling old myths (e.g. «Spain was among those other places in Europe that seemed to have nothing to do with science») but Cook does so with good sense and judiciousness. In six valuable pages, he reviews the changes that attitudes in the Anglo-American world have undergone regarding early modern Spanish medicine, summarizes the contents of the book, and argues that Spanish medicine was, in fact, «unexceptional». To make such a claim about a book that deals with «extra-academic practitioners», alchemy, witchcraft, and so on, demonstrates just how much our understanding of what is exceptional and unexceptional has changed in the last twenty years.In much the same way that Cook does in his introduction, Teresa Huguet-Termes begins her article on «Madrid Hospitals and Welfare» by dispelling myths; she quickly demonstrates the problems associated with applying models that were developed to explain urban environments fundamentally unlike Madrid to the capital of the Hapsburgs. Huguet-Termes’ overview of Madrid’s social programs for the sick and indigent demonstrates that these programs underwent dramatic changes in the 1560s, when Madrid transitioned from a center of regional importance to the capital of a global monarchy. She lucidly explains the bewildering number of hospitals founded and later subsumed in a relatively quick process of consolidation during the late sixteenth century: this involved a move «away from the organization of small hospitals towards a new, increasingly centralized hospital and welfare structure, dependent on royal or municipal administration». But, as she shows, institutional consolidation and governmental oversight also distanced the inhabitants of Madrid from the day to day work of caring for the poor. One of the pleasing aspects of many of the contributions to this volume is that they condense years of research and publication into concise articles. Reseñas Dynamis 2014; 34 (1): 211-263218Two chapters in this collection —María Luz López Terrada’s work on extra-academic practitioners in Valencia, and Mar Rey Bueno’s article on distillation at the Escorial— are good examples. López Terrada’s article, «Medical Pluralism in the Iberian Kingdoms: The Control of Extra-academic Practitioners in Valencia», considers a variety of interactions between academic and extra-academic medical practitioners. This article will be extremely helpful to those readers seeking an understanding of the range of medical practices —sanctioned and otherwise— available in early modern Spain, as well as an idea of the role of courts, institutions, and other bodies charged with overseeing many kinds of medical practice. For her part, Mar Rey Bueno brings together years of research on the distillation practices of Philip II, subtly but forcefully correcting some of the more extravagant tales told of the monarch’s interest in alchemy. What Rey Bueno shows in «La Mayson pour Distiller des Eaües at El Escorial» that Philip closely oversaw in the planning, constructing, and operating of the stills that produced fragrant medicinal waters and «miracle oils» for the court. Rey Bueno also deals quite nicely with one of the more vexing problems in the history of Spanish medicine: that Spain is often considered a colonial power first and only secondarily a locus for the production of medical knowledge (for good or for ill, English-speaking readers frequently expect that historians will represent Spanish medicine essentially as an epiphenomenon of imperial expansion). Rey Bueno soberly discusses the importance of American flora to Philip II, but without exaggerating colonial influences. María Tausiet’s article examines the charismatic healers known as saludadores who operated at the interface of science and religion. Saludadores were charged with healing the sick, on the one hand, and on the other with determining whether spells had been cast upon the afflicted and by whom. But as Tausiet shows, saludadores and witches were socially and religiously bound to one another. Witches and saludadores were «archetypal images» that «fit into a binary scheme» in which the woman «represented disease», and the man «represented health». But the world of the saludador was also permeated with fraud and theatricality; Tausiet contends that this evolved into forms of charlatanism that died out only recently.Focusing on medicine as ideological, Mónica Bolufer suggests the ways that «medicine has helped to theorize and justify gender differences». Her article, «Medicine and the Querelle des Femmes», begins with a discussion of texts by authors familiar to many scholars working on the history of Spanish letters: Francesc Eiximenis, Bernat Metge, Luis de León, and so on. The heart of her article, however, concerns a number of classic medical texts: Juan Huarte de San Juan’s ReseñasDynamis 2014; 34 (1): 211-263219Examen de ingenios, Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera’s Nueva filosofía, Blas Álvarez de Miraval’s Conservación de la salud through to Benito Feijoo’s eighteenth-century Defensa de las mujeres. These are likely the Spanish medical texts most familiar to this volume’s intended audience, but Bolufer’s approach —focusing on subjects such as breastfeeding— helps breathe life into a familiar subject.Without losing sight of the broader context of the Sephardic Diaspora, Jon Arrizabalaga pays particular attention to Rodrigo de Castro’s «intellectual agenda» and «intellectual world» in an article entitled «Medical Ideals in the Sephardic Diaspora». During the 1580s, De Castro left Portugal for Antwerp, probably for religious reasons, ultimately making his way to Hamburg. Arrizabalaga examines De Castro’s Medicus-politicus, the subject of which was the «functions of medical practice that were related to the republic’s governmental tasks». De Castro advocates Hippocratic-Galenic approaches, rejecting «the empiricist and methodist sects» as well as Paracelsus. By contrasting the work of De Castro with Henrique Jorge Henríques’ Retrato, Arrizabalaga is able to demonstrate that De Castro defends the «usefulness of university medicine» from attacks such as Henríques’. Crucial here is Arrizabalaga’s observation that De Castro defends the very institutions that formed part of a state apparatus that was «far from mild» in its treatment of Jews. In this way, Arrizabalaga shows that loyalties and beliefs often did not conform to our expectations of particular religious identities. In summary, this book accomplishes the four things its editors set out to do. First, it introduces English-speaking audiences to the work first-rate historians who have published much of their most significant work in Spanish. Second, it provides an overview of recent approaches to and findings in the history of Spanish medicine; the contributors are finely attuned to the importance of gender, as well as of ethnic, religious, and socio-economic diversity. Third, it suggests avenues for future research; although the articles are not generally comparative in nature, scholars working in other traditions will find many points of comparison for further exploration. And fourth, it brings to wider attention a rich array of sources, many of which are not widely available: not only documents and archival materials, but also unpublished dissertations, journals whose names will surely be unfamiliar to many readers, and books that never circulated widely and are now long out of print. In a book designed to give a sense of current trends in the field, readers will not miss the fact that the contributors are made up of both independent scholars and scholars with traditional research appointments. Clearly, some of the most exciting research on early modern Spanish medicine is taking place outside the academy. If there is a general criticism to make of the book, it is that the articles are sometimes rather Reseñas Dynamis 2014; 34 (1): 211-263220episodic; examples and subjects sometimes seem to pile up without much narrative propulsion. But this is due more to the ambition and scope of the book than to the particular deficiency of any of its articles. œJohn Slater University of Colorado at BoulderFernando Vidal. The sciences of the soul: the early modern origins of psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 2011, 440 p. ISBN: 9780226855868. $55.00.The sciences of the soul es la versión inglesa del libro Les sciences de l’âme XVIe-XVIIIe siècle, publicado cinco años antes por la editorial Champion (París). El título francés enmarca claramente el periodo histórico del estudio, aunque el énfasis está en el siglo de las luces. Esto es debido a uno de los principales objetivos del autor: siguiendo una línea de investigación iniciada por otros historiadores como, por ejemplo, Hatfield 1, quiere mostrar que la psicología ya existía como ciencia empírica y autónoma al menos un siglo antes del momento celebrado por la historiografía tradicional como fundacional (1879). Según su relato, la psi-cología se perfilaba como disciplina a lo largo de los tres siglos como «física del alma», aunque ligada a la filosofía natural y a la antropología cristiana. Con ello se refiere a la scientia de anima, que en la Edad Media fue impartida como parte del currículum que preparaba para los estudios de medicina, derecho y teología. Su interés se dirige, sobre todo, a estudiar el proceso histórico de constitución y legitimación que permitió a la psicología adquirir protagonismo en el marco científico europeo de dicho periodo, hasta llegar a ser considerada en la época de Kant como la «reina de las ciencias».Incitado por la convicción que «las palabras y las cosas estan íntimamente relacionadas», Vidal rastrea, de forma parecida a como lo había hecho anterior- 1. Hatfield, Gary. Psychology as a Natural Science in the Eighteenth Century. Revue de Synthese. 1994, 115: 375-391.

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