Katherine White is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego, and a 2024-2025 Consortium Research Fellow.
My project considers how professional, popular, and indigenous medical, surgical, and health practices influenced and operated alongside one another in Iberia and New Spain from 1492–1650, resulting in hybrid medical spaces in which multiple traditions were employed in tandem or tension on both sides of the Atlantic. I join historians that approach the history of medicine and Empire through concepts of hybridity, pluralism, or in relation to cultural mestizaje as a dynamic process in which European, indigenous, African, and colonial medical frameworks existed and developed, while also reflecting fluid negotiations of inequality and power through which medical information was mediated and differences across cultures and peoples assessed. I argue throughout this work that study of medicine and anatomy within these hybrid spaces offers entry for considering the projection of concepts like “human” and “rationality” circulating in medical, ecclesiastical, and colonial discourse onto the material world, often through the literal and metaphysical medicalization of indigenous, African, gendered, or diseased bodies.
This project contributes to literatures on hybrid medicine through analysis of multiple scales of medical labor–licensed, traditional, popular, indigenous–in Iberia and New Spain, and how they appear in different kinds of primary source materials. While printed works represent the perspectives of licensed practitioners, additional references to “popular” and Indigenous practices appear in judicial records and Inquisition proceedings; information on female practitioners and women’s medicine may take the form of recipes or instructions for managing menstruation, miscarriage, and abortion. My research incorporates these diverse sources, including inquisitorial, judicial, and hospital records, recipes, ordinances for practitioners, requests for licensing, and limpieza de sangre for doctors, along with methods from history of science, visual and material history, and the history of the book for analyzing the cultural relevance of why certain information appears in certain forms. This project is interdisciplinary and comparative, but also global—through case studies focusing on different kinds of medical practices, labor, institutions, and mediums in which medical description and information was recorded, I join historians that put heterogeneous medical spaces developing across the Empire into conversation, and within the context of broader transmissions of knowledge, goods, and people.
Funding from the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine to use the rare book collections at the Huntington Library and Linda Hall Library has been vital in supporting the first two chapters of my dissertation on the activity, censorship, and print outputs of licensed medical practitioners in Iberia and Mexico. My ongoing work at the Huntington has focused on the library’s collection of sixteenth-century texts printed in New Spain. These include rare copies of 1579 and 1592 editions of Augustin Farfán’s Tractado breve de anothomia y chirugia, and a 1578 edition of Hinojosos’ Summa y recopilacion de chirugia. Both were among a sparse number of Spanish-trained physicians working in sixteenth-century colonial hospitals and members of religious brotherhoods. Explicitly for popular use, these books illuminate the rapidly developing print, medical, and public health environments of the early colonial period. I have also worked with Francisco Hernández’ Quatro Libros, prepared by Francisco Ximenez and printed in New Spain in 1615. Tasked by the king to document medicinal plants in the Americas, Hernández’ writings offer insight into early collection and appropriation of local knowledge into colonial and Spanish medical practice.
While at Huntington I have begun incorporating non-medical texts printed in New Spain on indigenous languages and conversion written by Franciscan friars into my work. Discussion of what constitutes “rationality” and a capacity for conversion appears explicitly as conquistadors, the judiciary, medical practitioners, and the Church attempted to incorporate indigenous peoples into a Catholic worldview used to justify imperial expansion and forced labor. Through this thread of my research, I have also worked with the library's pristine copy of Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas Brevísima relacioń de la destrucción de las Indias printed in Seville in 1552. Las Casas’ writing provides a detailed account of violence waged against indigenous peoples, and acts as a powerful example of the diversity of opinions and conflicting sentiments on questions of “humanness” across the Empire’s political and geographic spectrum.
The other half of my work with printed texts focuses primarily on medical and anatomical texts from sixteenth-century Iberia and Italy, emphasizing the exchange of ideas, books, and people between Spain, Italy and the rest of Renaissance Europe. At the Linda Hall Library, I worked with the collection’s 1543 edition of Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica. While the most famous part of Vesalius’ career occurred as a young anatomist working in Italy, Vesalius engaged, debated, or worked with Spanish practitioners like Francisco Hernández and Juan Valverde, and spent the last twenty years of his life in service to the Spanish Crown. His students and writings became prominent features of anatomical training at Spanish universities in the sixteenth century. Studying Vesalius’ alongside Spanish practitioners and other figures in the history of medicine whose histories overlap with Iberia has provided insight into European cultures of print and medical writing that spanned languages and space, eventually crossing the Atlantic to the colonized Americas. In future visits to the Huntington, I hope to continue the work I began at Linda Hall on Vesalius by consulting the Huntington copies of the 1543 and 1555 editions of De humani corporis fabrica, and a German translation of Epitome that includes original anatomical flap prints cut out and assembled within. While at Linda Hall, I was also exposed to two texts in the collection that belong to the genre of the “book of secrets”–a 1590 edition of Levinus Lemnius’ De miraculis occultis naturæ, and a 1596 edition of Italian physician and alchemist Leonardo Fioravanti’s Compendio de’secreti rationali diviso in libri cinque. Both texts contribute to facets of my research that incorporate recipes for medical, household, and cosmetic usage, that bring together licensed works in print with the writing of non-licensed practitioners that appear in archival materials and manuscript sources.
The research I have conducted within these rich book repositories on the history of the book and the politics of print culture helps me to further place the relationship between the physical mediums of archives and libraries, and different types of medical practice, into conversation. How, for example, do indigenous medical practices appear in widely circulated printed works by Spanish practitioners in the Huntington’s collection, like Farfán’s Tractado breve de anothomia y chirugia, compared to Inquisition records that scrutinize indigenous and popular practitioners in Spain and Mexico? How is the relationship between conversion, spirituality, superstition, and the body addressed in printed works like the Huntington’s copy of Spanish anatomist Juan Valverde’s Anatomia del corpo humano, and Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, both translated and well-circulated across Europe, compared to ordinances regulating midwifery, indigenous nurses, or cross-Atlantic discourse around licensure and limpieza de sangre for medical practitioners?
Critical to my work on Early Modern print has been the physical inspection of sources. In-person study of these materials at the Huntington and Linda Hall has been essential as the books themselves accumulate subtle signs of their circulation, readership, and use. As I conduct research at more and more libraries over time, I will continue applying the skills I learned during my preliminary work using these collections–inspecting provenance marks and marginalia, fingerprints, binding, paper, and firebrands/marcas de fuego signaling institutional ownership. Many of the books that I have worked with as part of this project have few extant copies, with the Huntington library specifically holding editions with fewer than half a dozen known copies still available for researchers. Over time, each copy of these texts that I inspect provides further insight to my research, as pairing known details of a book’s provenance with physical signs of its treatment can provide unique information on an edition’s use across different contexts of ownership and circulation. Physical inspection of as many copies of these rare editions as possible is key for reverse-outlining an edition's history, a process I would not have been able to begin as a graduate student without Consortium support.