Sifilografía: A History of the Writerly Pox in the Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World(Writing the Early Americas)

Syphilis was a prevalent affliction in the era of the Americas' colonization, creating widespread anxiety that is indicated in the period's literature across numerous fields. Reflecting Spaniards' political prejudices of the period, it was alternately labeled "mal francés" or "el mal de las Indias." Sifilografía offers a cultural history that traces syphilis and its consequences in the transatlantic Spanish-speaking world throughout the long eighteenth century. Juan Carlos González Espitia charts interrelated literary, artistic, medical, and governmental discourses, exploring how fears of the disease and the search for its cure mobilized a transoceanic dialogue that forms an underside of Enlightenment narratives of progress.Through a narrative revealing the transformation and retooling of ideas related to syphilis as a bodily contagion, González Espitia demonstrates the Spanish-speaking world's crucial relevance to a global understanding of the period in the context of current reassessments of Enlightenment thought. Broad in its scope, the book incorporates an extensive corpus of medical treatises, literary essays, poems, novels, art, and governmental documents. The rich overlapping matrix of authors and texts broached subvert the idea of a homogeneous interpretation of syphilis and contributes to the rediscovery of the wide-ranging historical, cultural, and philosophical impact of this disease in the Spanish-speaking world. Sifilografía seeks to open a productive dialogue with other area studies about the disparate meanings of science and Enlightenment.

About the Author :
Juan Carlos González Espitia is Associate Professor of Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of On the Dark Side of the Archive: Nation and Literature in Spanish America at the Turn of the Century.

Review :
Sifilografía is a sophisticated and wide-ranging analysis of syphilis as a cultural phenomenon in the eighteenth-century Hispanic world. With an eye for detail and a penchant for methodological innovation, González Espitia reveals fascinating interconnections across the Atlantic divide and, thereby, offers a tantalizing view into the underside of Hispanic societies and how syphilis, in its multiple discursive manifestations, ultimately destabilized Enlightenment ideals of progress.--Cristian Berco "Journal of World History" González Espitia has decoded in a masterly and highly suggestive way the polymorphous cultural significance of gálico in the vast and complex Hispanic world of the 18th century on both sides of the Atlantic, in both medical texts and other areas of knowledge, particularly those related to creative writing, a territory in which the results of his work are singularly brilliant.--Jon Arrizabalaga "Canadian Bulletin of Medical History" " Sifilografía is a highly original, groundbreaking piece of scholarship that offers a new perspective on the dialogue between early modern/modern fiction and the understanding of venereal diseases in Hispanic culture, delving into important topics like obscenity, contagion, and bodily transformation in the Spanish empire and its colonies. It is one of the very few studies that tackles Spain and the American colonies with equal dexterity and depth." --Enrique García Santo-Toma´, University of Michigan, author of The Refracted Muse: Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain An important book that studies a body of mostly unknown texts that are vital to our understanding of how Spanish-American colonial writers talked about medicine, sexuality, and culture. One of the most important contributions of this volume is a syphilography that highlights the foundational role that Spanish America had in the diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and resignification of a pandemic that was among the most impactful on human history. -- "Eighteenth-Century Studies" Splendid monograph... singularly brilliant. -- "Dynamis "