This book examines the lives, careers, and publications of a group of Spanish Renaissance surgeons as exemplars of both the surgical renaissance occurring across Europe and of the unique context of Spain. In the sixteenth century, European surgeons forged new identities as learned experts who combined university medical degrees with manual skills and practical experience. No longer merely apprentice-trained craftsmen engaged only with healing the exterior wounds and rashes of the body, these learned surgeons actively engaged with the epistemic shifts of the sixteenth century, including new forms of knowledge construction, based in empiricism, and knowledge circulation, based in printing. These surgeons have long been overshadowed by the innovative work of anatomists and botanists but were participants in the same intellectual currents reshaping many aspects of knowledge. Active in communities across both Castile and Aragon, learned surgeons formed an intellectual community of practitioners and scholars who helped reshape surgical knowledge and practice. This book provides an overview of the Spanish learned surgeons, known as medicos y cirujanos, who were influential in universities, on battlefields, at court, and in private practice. It argues that the surgeons' larger significance rests in their collective identity as part of the broader intellectual shift to empiricism and innovation of the Renaissance. Renaissance Surgeons: Learning and Expertise in the Age of Print is essential reading for upper-level students and scholars of the history of medicine and early modern Spain.

This book examines the lives, careers, and publications of a group of Spanish Renaissance surgeons as exemplars of both the surgical renaissance occurring across Europe and of the unique context of Spain. In the sixteenth century, European surgeons forged new identities as learned experts who combined university medical degrees with manual skills and practical experience. No longer merely apprentice-trained craftsmen engaged only with healing the exterior wounds and rashes of the body, these learned surgeons actively engaged with the epistemic shifts of the sixteenth century, including new forms of knowledge construction, based in empiricism, and knowledge circulation, based in printing. These surgeons have long been overshadowed by the innovative work of anatomists and botanists but were participants in the same intellectual currents reshaping many aspects of knowledge. Active in communities across both Castile and Aragon, learned surgeons formed an intellectual community of practitioners and scholars who helped reshape surgical knowledge and practice. This book provides an overview of the Spanish learned surgeons, known as medicos y cirujanos, who were influential in universities, on battlefields, at court, and in private practice. It argues that the surgeons' larger significance rests in their collective identity as part of the broader intellectual shift to empiricism and innovation of the Renaissance. Renaissance Surgeons: Learning and Expertise in the Age of Print is essential reading for upper-level students and scholars of the history of medicine and early modern Spain.

This study of sixteenth-century Seville offers a new perspective on how early modern cities adapted to living with repeated epidemics of plague. Plague and Public Health in Early Modern Seville offers a reassessment of the impact of plague in the early modern era, presenting sixteenth-century Seville as a case study of how municipal officials and residents worked together to create a public health response that protected both individual and communal interests. Similar studies of plague during this period either dramatize the tragic consequences of the epidemic or concentrate on the tough "modern" public health interventions, such as quarantine, surveillance and isolation, and the laxness or strictness of their enforcement. Arguing for a redefinition of "public health" in the early modern era, this study chronicles amore restrained, humane, and balanced response to outbreaks in 1582 and 1599-1600 Seville, showing that city officials aimed to protect the population but also maintain trade and commerce in order to prevent economic disruption. Based on extensive primary sources held in the municipal archive of Seville, the work argues that a careful reading of the records shows a critical difference between how plague regulations were written and how they were enforced, a difference that reflects an unacknowledged process of negotiation aimed at preserving balance within the community. The book makes important contributions to the study of early modern city governance and to the historiography of epidemics more broadly. Kristy Wilson Bowers received her PhD from Indiana University and teaches in the History Department at Northern Illinois University.