| In this dissertation, entitled "Theaters of Anatomy: Diseased Bodies and History Writing in the Hispanic Transatlantic World," I establish a connection between medical and narrative disciplines using the famous medical treatise by Dr. Juan Huarte de San Juan, Examen de los ingenios para las ciencias , and three poetic/ history writing treatises, including Alonso Lopez Pinciano's Philosophia Antigua Poetica, Luis Cabrera de Cordoba's De Historia, para entenderla y escribirla, and Geronimo de San Jose's Genio de la historia. I explore how the permeable boundaries between medical and narrative practices are woven together to create political meaning in a corpus of texts from the sixteenth century. By establishing the intricate relationship between medicine, political goals, and narrative; my work creates a historical trajectory between genres and show the way that each appropriates and differentiates itself from one another. It also demonstrates the parallel and dependent relationship on the developing studies of medicine and historiography. I use this interdisciplinary link to compare the figure of a history writer to that of a practitioner and follow the figure of the history-writer practitioner as he transforms through three texts: from a knight in Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo's Las Sergas de Esplandian, to a traveler in Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion, and then as a friar in Bernardino de Sahagun's Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espana. In each text, I investigate how physical disease is linked to sin, and thus non-Christians are portrayed as diseased. Throughout the dissertation, I explore how writers of history negotiate ways in which to heal the sinful and integrate them into a healthy Christian civic body. |
