Weakening the sex

Chapter 3 addresses the link between colonial ideas on femininity and period understandings of gendered physiology. Similar to their European counterparts in that they deemed women to have a weaker constitution compared to men, medical authors in New Spain, however, began linking arguments on the female body to American environments specifically. Descriptions of physiological processes favoured stricter controls of women’s diets and behaviour under the guise of ensuring their good health. The rising numbers of European women in Mexico are reflected in the fact that the two locally printed medical books that went into second editions in the sixteenth century—Alonso López de Hinojosos’s Svmma (1578, 1592) and Agustín Farfán’s Tractado breve (1579, 1592)—both revised and abridged their first versions in order to make way for sections focused on the treatment of women and children. My analysis traces notions on gender, particularly in the case of ‘exceptional’ gestational processes resulting in 'manly women' and 'effeminate men', showing how authors in the New World brought together under a colonial prism older medical traditions that had taken divergent paths in Europe.

Epilogue

This section reflects on the cross-fertilisation between science, medicine, literature and art in the consolidation of New World identity and discourse, beyond the sixteenth century. It invites readers to consider towering figures in the cultural history of colonial Latin America, such as writer Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, polymath Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and painter Miguel Cabrera, discussing some of their connections to earlier texts on anatomy and physiology. The epilogue makes a case for redefining the medical texts studied in Marvels of Medicine as early matrixes of colonial rhetoric, scientific and literary objects that charted a course for future colonial subjects’ sense of identity in relation to the larger context of global knowledge production.

The surgeon’s secrets

Chapter 1 explores the Secretos de Chirurgia (1567), a text written by Pedro Arias de Benavides, a Spanish surgeon who travelled throughout the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America in the mid-sixteenth century. Part surgical manual, part medieval book of secrets, part voyage diary, the Secretos weaves together medical and anatomical information alongside the author's own extended personal journey. My analysis situates the text in the scientific context of the time, highlighting Benavides’s innovative use of medical illustrations, several of which are printed life-size and transform the work into a surgical instrument in and of itself. By comparing marginalia present in surviving copies of the book, I offer a roadmap into the range of possible period responses on the part of early modern readers. Sold in Europe as well as in the Americas, the text’s frequent humorous anecdotes betrayed a growing unease at the marginal status assigned to members of overseas communities by European authorities, anticipating future strategies of resistance to colonial rule, and calling into question the extent to which the peninsular/criollo divide is a useful distinction when examining materials written in colonial Mexico during its foundational period.

Irreconcilable differences?

Chapter 2 outlines the limits of a normative notion of the body in colonial medical discourse during the last third of the sixteenth century. It centres on a close reading of texts by Alonso López de Hinojosos and Juan de Cárdenas, comparing their ideas with discussions then unfolding in Europe about the purported radical difference between the physiology of Spaniards and those belonging to other ‘nations’ [naciones]. The chapter argues that American medical texts (sometimes unwittingly) became satellite testing grounds for emerging European ideas, not just on social cohesion, but also on racial difference. The juxtaposition of Old World ideas about corporeality with New World medical observations were both metaphorical and literal, given the reliance on Nahua bodies as sources of information to develop modes of care designed primarily to meet the needs of non-Indigenous patients. Despite many shared points of view, the comparison of Hinojosos against Cárdenas reveals a colonial paradox, with anatomy finding accumulating evidence of a repeating body template largely unaffected by a subject’s ethnicity, and physiology advancing instead models that understood racialised bodies as performing differently in arenas like nourishment needs or resistance to disease.

Contested medical knowledge and regional self-fashioning

Chapter 4 analyses Juan de Cárdenas’s Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias in the context of the negative critiques it offered of two contemporaries who had written about New World medicine without leaving Spain: Nicolás Monardes and Oliva Sabuco. Cárdenas found fault with both Monardes's Historia medicinal (1565) and Sabuco's Nveva filosofia de la naturaleza del hombre (1587) identifying flaws in the cause-and-effect reasoning espoused by each source and providing examples that arrived at different results. But Cárdenas’s medical challenge, articulated on scientific principle, belied a growing unease about the marginal status conferred to locally published scholarly efforts in the larger global stage of scientific enquiry; Monardes was keenly interested in New World bezoars especially whereas Sabuco’s ideas on digestion rested on her observations of the quick effects of ingesting coca leaves from Peru. By adopting an oppositional model of refutation that anchored itself on a geographically and culturally determined group identity, Cárdenas’s writing began mounting a challenge to the unequal distribution of epistemological authority in transatlantic colonial hierarchies.

Introduction

The introduction explains the book's scholarly contribution in the context of its interdisciplinary framework, particularly as it relates to the connection between the history of medicine and a the rise of a literary tradition in colonial Latin America. It argues for the importance of turning to medical books when assessing the emergence of a sense of identity linked to reading practices in colonial America, highlighting the often overlooked information these materials stand to offer about readers. Their preoccupation with the health of the community, and in the case of some projects, the fact that there was a demand for additional, revised editions allow us to trace aspects of their interaction with local audiences of the time in ways not possible with other materials. Lastly, this section analyses the relevance of emerging racial categories in early modern Mexico, as well as the existence of identity formulations that call into question a cohesive sense of "Spanishness" for that time and place, drawing attention to the shared radicado experience of the medical authors studied in the book.

Conclusion

This section briefly discusses the place of sixteenth century print medical texts written by authors who resided in colonial Mexico within the larger context of the study of Latin American letters. It stresses the need to maintain a distinction between presence and influence when assessing the significance of their texts within larger cultural traditions, both in the context of colonial writing and as outputs conditioned by the logic of scientific progress moving into the seventeenth century, which saw some of the most widely disseminated sources of the previous era slip into obscurity as new medical findings superseded earlier formulations. The conclusion remarks on the important role played by this group of radicado figures who authored the print medical books of early modern Mexico, considering how they articulated intellectual positions that both anticipated and differed from later criollo responses to colonial mechanisms for marginalisation and exclusion.