Medical Ideals in the Sephardic Diaspora: Rodrigo de Castro’s Portrait of the Perfect Physician in early Seventeenth-Century Hamburg

Abstract

As is well known, there were no formal systems of medical ethics until the end of the eighteenth century. Yet at least from the composition of the Hippocratic Oath, western scholarly debates, particularly among doctors, on the foundations of good medical practice and behaviour produced written works. These works simultaneously reflected and contributed to setting customary rules of collective behaviour—medical etiquette—that were reinforced by pressure groups who, while they could not always judge and sentence offenders, sanctioned them with disapproval. Most early modern works on medical~ etiquette were dominated by the question of what constituted a good medical practitioner, with the emphasis sometimes on the most suitable character of a physician, sometimes on professional behaviour.1 The medical literary genre of the perfect physician appears to have been popular in the early modern Iberian world, and the frequent involvement of converso practitioners in writing about it has often been associated with the peculiarities of their profes sional posi t ion in the territories under the Spanish monarchy.2 Among the most outstanding examples of this medical genre are a couple of printed works written by two Portuguese Jewish physicians who were almost exactly contemporary with each other, namely Henrique Jorge Henriques (c.1555–1622)3 and Rodrigo de Castro (c.1546–1627).4 Despite similarities, their images of the ideal medical practitioner appear to have been modified somewhat by each author’s differing life experiences and career, as I will show later on. De Castro’s life and works have been treated in a very limited and rather traditional way by historians, mostly according to the patterns of disciplinary history both medical and medical-ethical as well as of Jewish national history.5 Indeed, he has repeatedly been introduced as one of the founding fathers of modern gynaecology and obstetrics, as a medical ethicist well ahead of his time and, in particular, as an outstanding example of a singular, almost idiosyncratic excellence, that has supposedly characterized the professional practice of Jewish physicians throughout history.6 The present essay is an attempt to approach De Castro’s intellectual agenda in the context of the Sephardic medical diaspora, by exploring the portrait of the perfect physician that he drew in his Medicus-politicus. His views on the ideal medical practitioner need to be placed in the social context of the early modern European medical world and, specifically, in that of early seventeenth-century Hamburg.7 In order to understand better De Castro’s views, I will outline the vicissitudes of his life, beginning with his medical training at Salamanca University in about the mid-1560s. As we will see, far from any essentialist view about identities (Jewish or otherwise), De Castro’s intellectual profile was a typical example of the mutual fluid exchange of identities between the “new Christians” and the “new Jews”. This feature, which is easily detectable among early modern Sephardim, expressively illustrates the open, dynamic and complex nature of the processes of the configuration of identities, as well as the basic role that cultural diversity and mixing usually play in them.8 Still in terms of preliminary considerations, and in the light of the profound revision that the predominant historiographic paradigm of the “scientific revolution” has experienced during the last decades,9 I propose in my investigations of Rodrigo de Castro and other early modern Jewish physicians and philosophers not to be restricted by questions such as to what extent (if any) and why they participated in the scientific revolution, or whether the Jewish religion was an advantage or a disadvantage for this purpose. Rather, Iberian converso physicians’ activities should be re-situated in their specific socio-cultural context; and the intellectual “world” of these practitioners should be reconstructed in the most comprehensive way, particularly in connection with their educational background. The debt that these historiographic approaches owe to the new social and cultural history is clear, because of the greater prominence and complexity that these figures gain when they are studied through this new perspective, and because of the greater power of these strategies to reconstruct the past of Iberian medicine and science.