Yarí Pérez Marín. Marvels of Medicine: Literature and Scientific Enquiry in Early Colonial Spanish America. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. Illustrations. 224 pp. $130.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-78962-250-8.
Reviewed by Allison Bigelow (University of Virginia)
Published on H-LatAm (March, 2021)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
In Marvels of Medicine: Literature and Scientific Enquiry in Early Colonial Spanish America, Yarí Pérez Marín brings literary methods, visual analysis, and book history to an important yet understudied body of sixteenth-century texts: medical literature written from and about Mexico by Spanish-born writers. By focusing on how such men (they are all men) positioned themselves as authorities in a transatlantic world of print, attempting to make stable ever-changing biological materials, political identities, and literary techniques, Pérez Marín argues convincingly that their texts “crystallise a unique moment in the history of Latin American culture because they stood at the intersection of medicine and coloniality, turning to the literary experience in an effort to maintain that ultimately untenable position” (p. 6).
The book consists of four main chapters, organized thematically around four authors: Pedro Arias de Benavides, Secretos de Chirugia (Valladolid, 1567); Alonso López de Hinojosos, Svmma, y recopilacion de chirugia (Mexico City, 1578; second edition, 1595); Agustín Farfán, Tractado breve de anthomia y chirvgia, y de algvnas enfermedades, que mas comunmente suelen hauer en esta Nueua España (Mexico City, 1579); and Juan de Cárdenas, Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias (Mexico City, 1591). This tightly defined corpus allows for fine-grained analysis of scientific knowledge, communication, and authority, and keeps chapter lengths manageable for undergraduate teaching (between twenty and thirty pages).
The introduction lays out the difficulties of defining the very name of the field: “colonial Latin American literature.” Each term contains its own undoing and, when phrased together, they foreground “a teleological association between Europe and ancient Rome at the expense of a number of other possible contenders, given the region’s diverse cultural and ethnic composition” (p. 1). Studying colonial medical cultures offers one way to resolve the problem, revealing how race, science, and literature worked in tandem to shape “colonial imaginaries and subjectivities” in local and global communities (p. 14).
Chapter 1, “The Surgeon’s Secrets: The Medical Travel Narrative of Pedro Arias de Benavides,” puts Benavides in dialogue with European sources, like Guy de Chauliac’s Inventarium sive Chirurgia Magna (1363) and Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543). Pérez Marín contrasts metaphors of knowledge in Vesalius and Benavides, showing how subtle changes from third-person to first-person narration and ideas about correct and incorrect treatments placed Benavides outside of European traditions that were suspicious of innovation and within Latin American models in which imperial agents like Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Hernán Cortés reframed defiance as heroism. Although Mexican and European surgical books physically resembled each other in size and form, their images and narrative devices suggest how the work of Benavides, “a Spanish author, living back in Spain, writing a book for fellow Spaniards,” diverged from European models (p. 48).
Chapter 2, “Irreconcilable Differences? Anatomy, Physiology and the New World Body,” compares prose descriptions and images from Vesalius and Charles Estienne’s De dissection partium (1545) with Hinojoso’s Svmma to show how the Spanish author emulated and departed from European anatomy. By analyzing features like shading and perspective, Pérez Marín argues that Hinojoso’s images depict “the insides [not] of a body, but rather of the body” (p. 71). This medical abstraction happened at a time and in a place where debate raged about climatic determinism, the mutability of Spanish and African bodies in the Americas, and the influence of breast milk on human development and racial identity. Demographically speaking, the default body in sixteenth-century Mexico was Indigenous, a fact that medical works dealt with uneasily, indexing debates about colonization that were ultimately challenged by “moral and political philosophy” rather than “science or medicine” (p. 88).
Chapter 3, “Weakening the Sex: The Medicalization of Female Gender Identity in New Spain,” builds from this framework to analyze how a third author, Farfán, engages with female bodies and early modern theories of sex and gender. Unlike the physiological authors above, Farfán’s methods of “relatable, community-embedded” anatomy “did not blaze a new trail.” Anatomy, unlike physiology, was resolutely ambiguous on the major issues of the day, proving, over time, to be an equally “unreliable ally to the medical establishment over the next centuries when it came to unearthing conclusive evidence of difference related to gender and race” (p. 115). Like the Códice de la Cruz-Badiano, Farfán’s Tractado does not separate medical advice by sex but instead incorporates women’s health into the entire body of the work, at times “framing the discussion as a supplement to expert advice from other medical sources and his own practice” and at other using humor to “poke fun at women’s stubborn ways” (p. 108). This humor has bite and purpose: “The chorus of women resisting Farfán’s advice ... should not be seen necessarily as ignorant folk merely relying on their physical sensations to draw novel conclusions, expressing instead an embodied experience of older, once authorized, medical knowledge” (p. 111).
The final chapter, “Contested Medical Knowledge and Regional Self-fashioning,” uses circulation history and genre theory to show how Cárdenas engaged with and distorted the medical authority of Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera, primarily as a way to defend patriotic creole knowledge and disparage the work of armchair natural historians like Nicolás Monardes. Here, tobacco, as a proxy for New World knowledge and practice, figured largely into debates about medicine, individual practices, and public health. An insightful reading of “hostile marginalia” in the British Library’s copy of Cárdenas’s book concludes the chapter and suggests how local debates about knowledge and authority in Mexico were received in Europe (pp. 140-41).
A brief conclusion and epilogue on Andean herbs in El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, writing from “Spain in the midst of a literary Golden Age,” and the medical books visible in late colonial portraits of Sor Juana raise questions about the relationship between image and word, Mexico and the Andes, and the role of print in mediating such issues (p. 153). We are left to wonder whether and how ideas on health, healing, and a continuum of racialized and sexed bodies within Indigenous, African, and Asian communities in Latin America influenced medical writers like those studied here. Pérez Marín’s important new work is sure to generate future research on topics like these in literary studies of medicine.
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Citation:
Allison Bigelow. Review of Pérez Marín, Yarí, Marvels of Medicine: Literature and Scientific Enquiry in Early Colonial Spanish America.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56181
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