This rare English-language study of the medical history of early modern Spain is an important contribution to the ongoing attempts to incorporate Iberia into the history writing of early modern medicine, science, and technology. Outside Spanish scholarship such studies have most often been carried out without including the Spanish Empire, which has instead been consigned to parallel narratives of the political, military, and economic history of early modern Europe. Health and Medicine in Hapsburg Spain is aimed at an English-speaking audience, and is the result of a conference held at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in June 2006. As presented in Harold J. Cook's fine introduction to the publication, its six papers offer a golden opportunity for new readers to acquaint themselves with a number of previously neglected agents, and overlooked regional and institutional settings. The six studies present Hapsburg Spain as a susceptible environment for both progressive and traditional medical ideas and practices. The parallel development of new ideas rooted in Paracelsian medicine and Vesalian anatomy within the universities and the extra-academic and traditional practices carried out by folk healers or saludadores present Hapsburg Spain as both a unique and unexceptional stage of medical pluralism in early modern Europe.

Maria Luz Lopez Terrada's paper presents the institution of the Protomedicato, established by the Catholic monarchs in the late fifteenth century to ensure a high and uniform regulation and standard of medical practitioners within the Spanish realms. This institution was further strengthened and consolidated during the reign of Philip II, but never managed to obtain a complete monopoly of medical regulation. Philip II's surprising employment of the Paracelsian physician Llorenç Coçar as leader of the Protomedicato of Valencia collided with local preexisting laws and regulating bodies, and led to an alliance between the municipality and the university against the physician and his controversial practices and remedies. Mar Rey Bueno's paper on alchemy at the court of Philip II also deals with the Prudent King's interests in Paracelsianism and medical botany, and his establishments of medicinal gardens and distilleries in Aranjuez, Madrid, and El Escorial. Philip's initial interest in the transformation of metals in the early 1560s was only passing and always mixed with a firm scepticism, whereas studies of medical botany remained a high priority in the last thirty years of his reign. A curious example of the monarch's rooted disbeliefs is seen in his dismissal of the Friar Juan del Pozo, who, through the recommendation of the royal distiller of Aranjuez, sought a position at the court, and claimed to be able to prepare potable gold, artificial balsam, as well as to breed eels in a tank, and to know of a cave with precious stones not seen for three centuries. King Philip was instead determined to find new medical remedies in his botanical gardens, and vast overseas possessions — and was later imitated in this endeavor by his nephew Rudolf II, who grew up at his court.

Beyond the control of the king and his state apparatus, numerous local saludadores claimed to be able to cure rabies with spittle and to cool live coals on their tongues, and they often served an additional role as witch-hunters, as described in a very interesting paper by María Tausiet. She has found a particularly frightening example in the case of Francisco Casabone: this young saludador obtained a false license as Inquisitor General of the Kingdom of Aragon and thereby gained almost unlimited power to identify and condemn witches throughout Aragon, Valencia, Navarre, and Sicily. When he was finally exposed, he was given only a symbolic penalty for his abuse of the good name of the Holy Office. Jon Arrizabalaga's study of the Portuguese physician Rodrigo de Castro and his problems with limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), and later exile from Spain to Hamburg presents another ominous case study, and tends to support the traditional narrative of Black Legend Spain, embedded in Counter-Reformation, superstition, and xenophobia. De Castro nonetheless praised his former education at the University of Salamanca from his German exile, and his friend and colleague Enrique Jorge Enriquez obtained a prominent position at the medical faculty of the renowned institution in spite of his own similar converso background.

The contrasting and multifaceted state of Spanish Renaissance medicine is seen in Teresa Huguet-Termes's paper on the Madrid hospitals for the poor, which were without parallel in most other national contexts, and often supported generously by the proto-absolutist state of Charles V and Philip II. Monica Boluffer's paper deals with the medical view of women in early modern Spain, and contrasts Juan Huarte de San Juan's Examen de ingenios from 1575, and its concept of female inferiority, with the female author Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera's refutal of these claims, presented in her Nueva filosofía de la naturaleza del hombre from 1587.

All papers introduce a number of intriguing and overlooked characters and cases from the medical history of early modern Spain. Hats off to the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, which enables such publications — and which, one hopes, will continue to do so.