Medical Ideals in the Sephardic Diaspora: Rodrigo de Castro’s Portrait of the Perfect Physician in early Seventeenth-Century Hamburg
The present essay is an attempt to approach De Castro’s intellectual agenda in the context of the Sephardic medical diaspora, by exploring the portrait of the perfect physician that he drew in his Medicus-politicus. His views on the ideal medical practitioner need to be placed in the social context...
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2009 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) |
| Repositorio: | DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:digital.csic.es:10261/33639 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10261/33639 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | medical ethics XVI century XVII century XVIII century Rodrigo de Castro Henrique Jorge Henríques Hippocratic Oath Medical literary genre Medical etiquette |
| Sumario: | The present essay is an attempt to approach De Castro’s intellectual agenda in the context of the Sephardic medical diaspora, by exploring the portrait of the perfect physician that he drew in his Medicus-politicus. His views on the ideal medical practitioner need to be placed in the social context of the early modern European medical world and, specifically, in that of early seventeenth-century Hamburg. In order to understand better De Castro’s views, I will outline the vicissitudes of his life, beginning with his medical training at Salamanca University in about the mid-1560s. As we will see, far from any essentialist view about identities (Jewish or otherwise), De Castro’s intellectual profile was a typical example of the mutual fluid exchange of identities between the “new Christians” and the “new Jews”. This feature, which is easily detectable among early modern Sephardim, expressively illustrates the open, dynamic and complex nature of the processes of the configuration of identities, as well as the basic role that cultural diversity and mixing usually play in them. |
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