ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Long-longue Durée of Iberian Science and Medicine

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel addresses themes of “plural worlds” by bringing together scholars from a wide temporal range–Medieval, Early Modern, eighteenth–nineteenth-century, and Modern–focusing on the histories of science and medicine in Iberia and the Spanish Empire. Papers situated in the Medieval and Early Modern periods approach Iberian science as a hybrid, incorporating systems of knowledge from the Indian continent and Medieval Islamicate world, to the Americas during the early colonial period. Papers approaching the modern period consider science as a field of contestation, analyzing how nineteenth-century Spanish mothers negotiated their bodies between science and religion, and vaccines as biological propaganda during the Franco-era. This panel presents the history of Iberian and Hispanic science as a rich case study for how recurring concerns around the practice and meaning of science are negotiated in radically different contexts.

Placing episodes from the long-longue durée of Iberian science into conversation, this panel’s geographic, disciplinary, and cultural scope speaks further to “contested sciences” by emphasizing the fluidity of what counts as Spain–a site of military and religious struggle, a global power and colonial metropolis, a diminished nation-state under dictatorship–demonstrating how the peninsula became a site of heterogenous scientific identities and practice shifting across space and time. Covering nearly one thousand years of domestic and global Iberian science, this inter-periodical analysis challenges notions that a state can claim or maintain a discrete national identity that produces and reproduces a distinctly national science, inviting discussion on internal contestation within the territory, and concepts of Empire and state more broadly.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Adam Warren, University of Washington

Individual Presentations

• Iberian Globalities Through Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī’s Tabaqāt al-Umam - Juan Bosco Garcia Rodriguez, University of California, San Diego

• The Criminalization of Female Medical Practitioners During the Spanish and Mexican Inquisitions - Katherine White, University of California, San Diego

• Sanidad y Santidad: Medicalizing Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century Spain - Mary Kate Wolken, University of Minnesota

• Biopolitical Warfare: the Franco Dictatorship and Vaccine Hesitancy in Spain, 1955-1975 - Scott Lancaster, University of California, San Diego

Session Organizer

• Katherine White, University of California, San Diego