Book ID: CBB593267991

Sifilografía: A History of the Writerly Pox in the Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World (2019)

unapi

Syphilis was a prevalent affliction in the era of the Americas’ colonization, creating widespread anxiety that is indicated in the period’s literature across numerous fields. Reflecting Spaniards’ political prejudices of the period, it was alternately labeled "mal francés" or "el mal de las Indias." Sifilografía offers a cultural history that traces syphilis and its consequences in the transatlantic Spanish-speaking world throughout the long eighteenth century. Juan Carlos González Espitia charts interrelated literary, artistic, medical, and governmental discourses, exploring how fears of the disease and the search for its cure mobilized a transoceanic dialogue that forms an underside of Enlightenment narratives of progress.Through a narrative revealing the transformation and retooling of ideas related to syphilis as a bodily contagion, González Espitia demonstrates the Spanish-speaking world’s crucial relevance to a global understanding of the period in the context of current reassessments of Enlightenment thought. Broad in its scope, the book incorporates an extensive corpus of medical treatises, literary essays, poems, novels, art, and governmental documents. The rich overlapping matrix of authors and texts broached subvert the idea of a homogeneous interpretation of syphilis and contributes to the rediscovery of the wide-ranging historical, cultural, and philosophical impact of this disease in the Spanish-speaking world. Sifilografía seeks to open a productive dialogue with other area studies about the disparate meanings of science and Enlightenment.

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Reviewed By

Review Jon Arrizabalaga (2021) Review of "Sifilografía: A History of the Writerly Pox in the Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World". Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin Canadienne d'Histoire de la Medecine (pp. 440-442). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB593267991/

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Authors & Contributors
Miller, Cristanne
Earle, Rebecca
Buchan, Bruce
Combe, Thomas
Brown, Woodrow D.
Ryan, William John
Concepts
Spain, colonies
Colonialism
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Medicine
Medicine and culture
Progress, ideas of
Time Periods
18th century
17th century
19th century
16th century
Enlightenment
20th century
Places
Americas
Spain
Europe
Atlantic world
North America
Philippines
Institutions
Royal Society of London
Jesuits (Society of Jesus)
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