The Creation of Female Disability: Medical, Prescriptive and Moral Discourses

Abstract

The first chapter explores sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses in order to show how they inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of the female embodiment. The exposition includes selected medical works from the fifteenth to the end of sixteenth century that deal with anatomic descriptions of bodily functions, the role of each sex in procreation, and the explanation of diseases, prophylactic measures and cures. In addition, chapter 1 examines discourses of the plague and syphilis in order to show how stigmatizing diseases particularly affected women. Besides medical treatises, the chapter examines influential moral works, such as Juan Luis Vives’s De Institutione Feminae Christianae (1524) and fray Luis de León’s La perfecta casada (1583), as well as discourses on poverty such as Vives’s De subventione pauperum (1525), and Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera’s Amparo de pobres (1598), to illuminate how the established conception of female mental and physical inferiority had detrimental consequences for her diminished social role.