Medicine and the Querelle des Femmes in Early Modern Spain

Abstract

Among the forms of knowledge that express and at the same time shape world views and social standards, scientific discourse, like religious discourse, has played a key part in producing an appearance of truth, appealing to “nature” as incontrovertible evidence. Throughout history, medicine has helped to theorize and justify gender differences and inequalities by naturalizing them, that is, by basing the attribution of social functions and hierarchies on a set of physical, moral and intellectual inclinations and aptitudes, supposedly rooted in nature, which doctors declared themselves to be the persons most authorized to disclose and interpret. Indeed, in various ages and societies scientific discourses (particularly medical discourse) have persistently wondered about the meaning of gender difference and inequality, and in doing so they projected the conventions, expectations and prejudices of their own time on to their questions and responses, and on to the attitudes and results of their research and practice.1 The influence of medical science became particularly intense in European culture and society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the secularization of thinking reduced the preponderant role of providentialist explanations in favour of others based on “reason” and “evidence”, and the medical profession experienced an increase in its social prestige and power. Since medieval times, however, medical or philosophical explanations of classical origin and the Christian tradition based on the Bible and theological authorities had been the main pillars that supported theories about the different “nature”, functions and authority which corresponded to men and women in society.2 And therefore, in what they wrote for their professional colleagues or for a broader range of readers, doctors had an important influence on the societies in which they lived. They shaped the thinking, social practices and ways in which people understood and experienced their own bodies, their identity and their relation with others; on the one hand, by formulating and disseminating theoretical thinking about the sexually differentiated body, its influence on the moral and intellectual plane, and its connection with social organization, and on the other, by providing practical advice about how to lead one’s life which echoed those ideas and helped to spread them. In the Hispanic monarchy and the rest of Europe, the theories of humours formulated in Greek philosophy and medicine which had survived during the Middle Ages remained in force during the early modern centuries as a result of the influence of Galen’s work and the revival of the Hippocratic texts due to humanism.3 Their principles concerning gender difference are well known: men and women possess different degrees of the basic qualities (hot or cold, dry or moist), men being hotter and drier and women comparatively moister and colder.4 The greater heat of men supposedly makes it possible for their blood to concoct into semen, whereas in women, because of their lack of heat, the blood is transformed only imperfectly, leaving menstrual blood as an excess or residue.5 As for intellectual capacities, the theory of humours states that the hot, dry temperament of the male is better suited for knowledge than the moist, cold temperament of the woman. In accordance with the same principle, the male and female sexual organs are understood in terms of inverse symmetry or analogy: they are similar, but whereas those of the woman are retained inside the body because of the lack of the heat required to “expel” them, those of the man are external: as Juan Huarte de San Juan repeated as late as 1575, “man … is different from a woman in nought els (saith Galen) than only in hauing his genitall members without his body”.6 This explains why medicine sanctioned the possibility that people could experience a change of sex at some time in their life, when those internal organs might return to the outside as a result of some great effort (for example, during childbirth).7 Doctors were therefore required to testify in cases of hermaphroditism or sex change, as in the trial of Elena/Eleno de Cespedes held by the Inquisition in Toledo in 1587.8 It was envisaged that this change could occur only from woman to man, in accordance with the idea that nature tends towards greater perfection and can therefore never evolve in the opposite direction, from man to woman. For, according to the Aristotelian dictum, women are “imperfect” or “mutilated” men: as nature tends towards the greatest possible perfection, all embryos are initially male, although some of them become female during their evolution. All this was a way of understanding gender difference in which, as Thomas Laqueur has explained, anatomical condition was not at all decisive; rather, gender was to some extent considered to be the result of a difference in degree which admitted the possibility of intermediate states in nature (hermaphrodites, effeminate men, mannish women), when a person did not fully attain the natural properties of femaleness or maleness, and even accepted, exceptionally, the transition from woman to man, understood as an “improvement”.9 In other words, gender, i.e. the social and cultural attribution of a normative identity which involved legal differences and inequalities, and different expectations of behaviour for men and women, was not yet linked to an absolute biological duality, though this did not make it any less decisive in the hierarchical structuring of society and the sense of personal identity.10 This way of understanding gender difference was not restricted to the area of medicine but pervaded both the cultured and the popular thinking of the time. Thus medicine acted as a witness for the prosecution in the so-called querelle des femmes (querella de las mujeres in Spanish; querella de les dones in Catalan), the term used to refer to the literary and philosophical debate about the nature of the sexes and their respective inclinations, qualities and vices which took place in Spain and the rest of Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, often linked to another debate, about marriage, extensively developed during the Renaissance and the Reformation.11 Medical arguments were generally used in the controversy to support misogynist attitudes about the inferiority and even perniciousness of women, but they were also sometimes employed in the context of the basically courtly tradition which defended their moral and intellectual “excellence”, as exemplified by the German humanist, doctor and alchemist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettes heim in his book De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (1529), that some years later was published in French under the title Sur la noblesse et l’excellence du sexe feminin, de sa preeminence sur l’autre sexe (1537).12 In this paper I am interested in showing the way in which ideas about male and female “nature” were expressed in early modern medical literature, and their consequences on the social plane, by an analysis of, on the one hand, Huarte de San Juan’s influential work Examen de ingenios para las sciencias (1575) (The examination of mens wits) and, on the other, some examples of “counsels for health” or popular medical literature. I shall compare the ideas, values and arguments developed in these medical texts with the ones represented in other moral and literary texts of the time, dwelling on the example of maternal breast-feeding, which provides a very good illustration of the peculiarity of family models and behaviour patterns in the Old Regime in relation to those which began to be popularized in the eighteenth century. I shall conclude with a brief comment on the work published by Benito Feijoo in the 1720s, which revealed the ideological role of physiological and anatomical discourses in the construction of the “nature” of the sexes, thus formulating an early criticism of the biological determinism which became so fashionable in European thinking in the nineteenth century.