From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain by Cristian Berco

Reviewed by: From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain by Cristian Berco José Pardo-Tomás Berco, Cristian — From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Pp. 64. The history of venereal disease, referred to by several names (mal de bubas, mal francés, morbus gallicus, Great Pox, etc.) in Early Modern Europe, has been of continuous interest to the history of medicine since its appearance as a discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. But it wasn't until the 1970s that medical historians, habitually inflicted with presentism and teleological explanations, reoriented themselves according to social history and later the cultural history of medicine. It is now twenty years since the publication of The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe, by Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French, perhaps the definitive turning point between an old and renovated historiography of mal francés; and within a few months it will be a decade since the publication of Claudia Stein's Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Germany. Without doubt, Berco's study, centred this time in Baroque Spain, represents another important moment in the social and cultural history of venereal disease. Berco's research has as its starting point the analysis of a privileged historical source: the patient admissions book from the Hospital de Santiago, in the Castilian city of Toledo, during the twelve years between 1654 and 1665. That book contains the names of around four thousand patients—mostly listed by name, age, place of origin, occupation, and providing descriptions of the clothing and personal effects they had with them at the time of admission. All of those entered were suffering from mal francés, an illness conceptualized as "new" towards the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, and which gave rise to the appearance of hospitals dedicated exclusively to the care of those afflicted; such was the case at the Hospital de Santiago around 1500. It's not just the source that makes Berco's study impressive; Berco confronts complex methodological challenges, for instance, by supplementing the admissions book with additional sources—some as "oceanic" as notarial archives—in order to find traces left by those individuals before and after they had been admitted to the Hospital de Santiago as "poxed people." Although more than one reader will certainly want more, the succinctness of the book is one of its virtues. Berco has been able to avoid the temptation of elaborating a never-ending discussion led by the fertile potential of his materials. His choice of economic expression does not detract from his brilliant analysis. This brevity is striking in a work with such an ambitious and overarching structure, beginning with the introduction (pp. 3-20) during which he defends his methodological choices and the theoretical standpoint that he assumes in his book. For Berco, illness is a concept subject to constant changes not only in time, but in space; it always depends on a local context, where the sick and the healthy, the [End Page 163] transmitters and the healers, elaborate on the illness, the expectations of its cure, and even the social morality of those afflicted. The first chapter focuses on the cultural context from which emerged the construct of the new venereal disease and the social imaginary of those afflicted with mal de bubas (one of the other names given to the illness in Castilian). Berco explores a select group of texts found in the riches of Spanish literature of the early modern era, from Celestina at the end of the fifteenth century to Los desahuciados by Torres Villarroel at the beginning of the eighteenth—passing through Cervantes' novels, Quevedo's poems, and many lesser known, but important authors (Pantaleón de Ribera, Cristóbal Mosquera de Figueroa or Sebastián de Horozco,) who contributed to the cultural construction of venereal disease during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These texts become important reference points throughout From Body to Community. The second chapter, by contrast, focuses on a different type of historical literature, medical treatises, and their contribution to the cultural construction of the illness...

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