From Cures to Courts of Justice: The Medical Encounter and Social Order in Early Modern Spain (360G-Wellcome-208003_Z_17_Z)

Early modern encounters have mainly been studied as transactions between individual sick people and their healers. This project shifts the focus by placing encounters within the communities that structured early modern lives and the practices and expectations of social order that shaped them. The variety of encounters that took place in the Catholic kingdom of Castile provides an ideal case study to establish this fresh perspective on the politics of health care. By combining trial records, tracts on medical etiquette and literary sources, the project explores how encounters intersected with the domestic, collective and religious order of close-knit urban and rural communities. It has three main goals: 1) To reveal which assumptions about norms and stability guided the encounters. 2) To explore how in practice encounters fostered or disrupted social stability. Subsidiary goals are: to show how communities monitored, and communicated about, healing practices; to discuss how, as encounters unfolded, religious discipline intersected with other facets of social order. 3) To assess the informal and formal strategies, including legal, by which communities managed controversial encounters. Subsidiary goals are: to understand how an encounter turned into a legal dispute; to evaluate which short- and long-term consequences this process had for communities.