Overview

Spanish physicians constituted a crucial political force in the nineteenth century during the tumultuous process of nation-building that followed the War of Independence against the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. Many participated in the Cortes of Cádiz, which drafted Spain's first constitution in 1812 and went on to prove highly influential in the public sphere and legislature during the liberal revolution that undertook the establishment of a new, and precarious, political order. Andrew W. Keitt's A Physician in the Age of Liberal Reform excavates the life and work of one such doctor, Ildefonso Martínez y Fernández, whose brief career coincided with the consolidation of the liberal revolution and the drive to improve and professionalize Spanish medicine. Born in 1821, Martínez was a polymath and activist whose prolific literary and scholarly output made him a fixture in the political and intellectual ferment of midcentury Spain until his untimely death in 1855 during a devastating outbreak of cholera. He produced a significant body of intellectual research, made key contributions to the profession, and cultivated a deep engagement with the political struggles of the period. His impassioned endeavors, as chronicled by Keitt, highlight the efforts of Spanish physicians to mobilize medical science toward forging a new political culture for liberal Spain.

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9780807182284

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Reviews

"Andrew W. Keitt's book, intensively researched and engagingly written, illuminates the life and work of an important but understudied figure as well as the linked social, political, and medical movements that fostered the development of Spanish liberalism. - Elizabeth A. Williams, author of Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950 """"A Physician in the Age of Liberal Reform presents a detailed investigation of a complex and multifaceted individual who was both innovative and emblematic of his time. In so doing, the study makes a critical contribution to the analysis of medicine's central role in crystallizing the values, discourses, and practices that hastened the collapse of the old regime and contributed to the fitful, imperfect emergence of a new liberal order in nineteenth-century Spain."""" - Enric J. Novella, López Piñero Inter-University Institute for Science Studies, University of Valencia"

Author Information

Andrew W. Keitt, associate professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is the author of Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain.

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