Medicina i farmàcia [Medicine and pharmacy]- La ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700 Collection
- Albert Garcia Espuche (director)
- Barcelona City Council. Museu d’Història de la Ciutat
- Barcelona, 2011
- 303 pages
The Medicina i farmàcia (2011) volume of the Barcelona 1700 collection includes contributions by Albert Garcia Espuche, Alfons Zarzoso, Josep Maria Camarasa, Àlvar Martínez Vidal, José Pardo Tomás, Teresa Huguet Termes, Adrià Casas Ibáñez and Julia Beltrán de Heredia Bercero. In fact, the topic of medicine in the 17th and 18th centuries was a pivotal one, not only in the strict sense of health, meaning public and private hygiene, but also thanks to the contribution made by doctors to the appearance of a new mentality which in philosophy is known as empiricism. Medicine and public hygiene are two core parameters in the expression of modernity.
The importance of medical breakthroughs in shaping the change in popular mind-sets in the transition to the modern era has never been properly accounted for. Without the first medical breakthroughs in the fight against a long series of diseases, the power of the Church –and of tradition in general– would not have received the blow it did in the Age of Enlightenment. But medicine is not merely a kind of knowledge; in the eyes of historians it is also a guild that accumulates power. Since the Middle Ages, Catalan doctors, and particularly those hailing from Girona, had a long tradition of going to Montpellier (a centre of medical materialism in the 17th and 18th centuries, even commented upon by Diderot in D’Alembert’s Dream) to complete their training, and were an essential part of the political and institutional oligarchy. This is why the European-wide medical debate that raged throughout the second half of the 17th century, with the traditional Galenists pitted against the “chemical” innovators, had a major echo in Catalonia in the twofold scientific and institutional sense.
The Estudi de Medicina of Barcelona, created in 1565, was not just structured around the school of the Hospital de la Santa Creu, rather it had also constructed a complex public health network in which doctors, apothecaries, surgeons and barbers, healers, midwives and even vets all had their own area of responsibility and where complicated problems of coexistence often reared their head. In fact, besides knowing Catalan, doctors also had to understand Latin. Works such as the Pharmacopea catalana [Catalan Pharmacopoeia], by Joan d’Alòs (1686), illustrate the difficulty involved in regulating the profession. Nor is it extraneous to know that this text was replaced in 1739 by the Pharmacopoeia matritensis, imposed by the Royal Tribunal of the Protomedicus of Castile for the purpose of standardisation.
The rupture caused by the Catalan defeat in the War of the Spanish Succession shattered the Catalan medical tradition, as documented in the valuable article by Alfons Zarzoso “Més que metges: ‘gaudints’” [More than doctors: privileged members of society]. Doctors were well-read individuals who tended to establish complex mechanisms to be part of the city’s well-to-do (the “gaudints”). However, at the same time, medicine and scientific activity were thriving, as documented by the Salvador line of botanists, and particularly Jaume Salvador i Riera (1683-1726), educated in France and Italy, who maintained extensive correspondence with the scientists of the time and who illustrates how culture fared very well in the archduke’s times. The pieces on “Mestres cirurgians i mestres anatòmics” [Master surgeons and master anatomists], by Àlvar Martínez Vidal and José Pardo Tomás, and “L’Hospital de la Santa Creu” (The Santa Creu Hospital), by Teresa Huguet Termes, also provide extensive documentation on a by no means negligible scientific activity which was brutally put down in the wake of the country’s defeat.