Medicine and the Querelle des Femmes in Early Modern Spain

Among the forms of knowledge that express and at the same time shape world views and social standards, scientific discourse, like religious discourse, has played a key part in producing an appearance of truth, appealing to ‘‘nature’’ as incontrovertible evidence. Throughout history, medicine has helped to theorize and justify gender differences and inequalities by naturalizing them, that is, by basing the attribution of social functions and hierarchies on a set of physical, moral and intellectual inclinations and aptitudes, supposedly rooted in nature, which doctors declared themselves to be the persons most authorized to disclose and interpret. Indeed, in various ages and societies scientific discourses (particularly medical discourse) have persistently wondered about the meaning of gender difference and inequality, and in doing so they projected the conventions, expectations and prejudices of their own time on to their questions and responses, and on to the attitudes and results of their research and practice. The influence of medical science became particularly intense in European culture and society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the secularization of thinking reduced the preponderant role of providentialist explanations in favour of others based on ‘‘reason’’ and ‘‘evidence’’, and the medical profession experienced an increase in its social prestige and power. Since medieval times, however, medical or philosophical explanations of classical origin and the Christian tradition based on the Bible and theological authorities had been the main pillars that supported theories about the different ‘‘nature’’, functions and authority which corresponded to men and women in society. And therefore, in what they wrote for their professional colleagues or for a broader range of readers, doctors had an important influence on the societies in which they lived. They shaped the thinking, social practices and ways in which people understood and experienced their own bodies, their identity and their relation with others; on the one hand, by formulating and disseminating theoretical thinking about the sexually differentiated body, its influence on the moral and