Treating the Mentally Ill in Don Quijote: ‘Discursos Medicinales’ and Women’s Domestic Manuals

• In Event: The Social Dynamics of Medicine in Early Modern Spain

Abstract

Following in the footsteps of Galen, Avicenna, Dioscorides, and Hispanic Muslim and Jewish doctors like Averroes and Maimonides, early modern physicians took a scientific stance to mental illness as they began to dispel the theologically-charged popular attitudes that mental illness served as punishment for a moral defect or sin against God. In Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes reflects early modern physicians’ scientific stance to mental illness. More than the cause itself, this paper examines the fascinating way in which Cervantes develops responses to the illness and how those responses compare to the trailblazing contemporary practices occurring in hospitals in Spain for treating mental health patients and to recipes found in women’s domestic manuals.

Author

• Carolyn Nadeau, Illinois Wesleyan University