Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, a number of historians of medicine and other scholars have written and given interviews about past public health crises. E. Thomas Ewing’s look at how newspapers focused on kissing during the 1918 influenza outbreak suggested that the emphasis on kissing via handkerchief 100 years ago signaled potentially troubling questions for… Read more →
Tag: spain
Heart Transplantation, Democracy, and Collective Forgetting in Contemporary Spain
Throughout my life, Spain – the country where I was born and raised – has been the global leader in organ donation and transplantation, a horn we toot frequently and proudly. We hear about this every time new data on organ donation becomes available, every time someone wants to make an argument about the goodness… Read more →
Mujeres Libres: Women, Anarchy, and the Fragility of Democracy in Spain
Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sanchez decided to call a snap election in April 2019 following the withdrawal of support by the Catalan separatists who were propping up his government. The short-term implications of another general election in Spain were great, as the lack of a stable government in recent years has impacted Spain’s social… Read more →
Sex, Death, and Atole at the Royal Indian Hospital
Mexico City, 18th Century For the wounded, diseased, and ailing of Mexico City, just about anything was better than the Royal Indian Hospital. By the 18th century it had been around awhile. King Philip II had established the Indian Hospital in the 1560s in a haphazard attempt to demonstrate the Crown’s supposed “piety and love… Read more →
Public Theater and Health Care in the Early Modern Spanish World
In May of 1646, don Duarte Fernando Álvarez de Toledo Portugal, the Viceroy of the Kingdom of Valencia, wrote a letter to King Philip IV. The Spanish monarch, who ruled over the various territories that comprised the Crown of Castile (including overseas dominions in the Americas) and the Crown of Aragón (which included Catalonia, Valencia,… Read more →