ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Medical Opinion at the Real Audiencia: How Healers Inspected, Interpreted, and Valued the Human Body in Eighteenth-Century Chile

• In Event: Bodies, Values, Materiality: New Histories of Health and Illness in Early Modern Latin America

English Abstract

Drawing on eighteenth-century judicial records from early modern Chile, this paper examines how medical practitioners and healers from diverse backgrounds engaged with the human body to produce expert testimony—and how social, economic, and institutional forces shaped their opinions.

In late colonial Chile, Spanish royal courts frequently summoned medical practitioners and healers to provide expert assessments on bodily injuries, illnesses, the health condition of defendants, or the causes of death. These early modern courts became fertile arenas for debating how the human body should be understood, interpreted, and valued. Within this context, healers interacted with judicial authorities and litigants to define the meanings of bodily signs, diagnostic categories, and disease prognoses. Practitioners were required to read bodily signals through observation, examination, touch, pulse-taking, and interrogation to extract their significance. Issuing a medical opinion in court thus entailed direct engagement with the body’s materiality—a process where multiple gazes and gestures converged, entangled with personal ambitions, economic interests, and social reputations.

Moreover, medical declarations carried tangible legal consequences, influencing both the practitioner’s standing and the outcome of judicial proceedings. This paper explores how these factors shaped the ways in which practitioners inspected bodies, described wounds and illnesses, and determined causes of death. Ultimately, it considers how Chilean colonial society—through its judicial apparatus and healing agents—evaluated and ascribed value to the human body and its ailments. Such evaluations reflected broader social hierarchies and material concerns: the status of the examined person, the cost of treatments and medicines, and the potential legal repercussions. Together, these dynamics reveal how the corporeal map of the sick or deceased was configured before the Royal Court.
This paper in part of the panel “Bodies, Values, Materiality: New Histories of Health and Illness in Early Modern Latin America”

Author

• Mariana Labarca Pinto, Universidad de Santiago de Chile