Disease, Caregiving, and Healing: Medical Discourse and Practice in Early Modern Spanish Literature

Undergraduate / Graduate

What can literature tell us about how early modern Spain imagined the body, understood disease, and negotiated the authority and methods of healing? These questions remain relevant to today's cultural and ethical debates around medicine. Looking to the early modern period, when medicine was inseparable from religion, politics, and philosophy, allows us to uncover how deeply embedded and contested medical knowledge once was-and still is. In early modern Spain, medicine was not merely a technical or scientific field, but a cultural and social practice shaped by forces such as plague, imperial expansion, and the rise of early scientific thought. This course examines how literature reflected, negotiated, and at times subverted prevailing understandings of health, illness, and medical practice, offering insight into the cultural and epistemological transformations of the period. Students will explore how early modern Spanish literature engages with contemporary medical knowledge and popular belief-illuminating cultural anxieties surrounding disease, healing, and the physician's social role-while also analyzing how illness, diagnosis, and treatment function as narrative engines that generate conflict, develop character, and drive plot. Readings will include works by Miguel de Cervantes, María de Zayas, Tirso de Molina, Lope de Vega, and others.