Katherine Eleanor White

My dissertation examines Spanish interest in anatomy and its transmission across the many medical, religious, artistic, and literary textual and visual cultures intersecting the Spanish Empire. It first surveys the medical-visual environment of 16th–century Europe that foregrounded Andreas Vesalius’ 1543 De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, arguing for attention to analogous debates and visual materials concerning the body and definitions of the “human” emerging from across the Iberian world. These debates reveal cultural, intellectual, and visual continuities between Iberia and the rest of Europe, and demonstrate mutually reinforcing interests in the evolution of bodily knowledge and their representation in print that extend past traditional anatomy histories that privilege Northern Italy. To situate this discourse in an environment heavily informed by expansion across the Atlantic, I consider the circulation of debate on anatomy and representations of the body across the diverse medical landscape of colonial Mexico. In addition to adding rare Iberian and Latin American chapters to visual studies of science, attention to the tumultuous effects of Iberian colonial activity on medical history, adds to recent work attempting to reconstruct the origins of “Western” medicine and challenge its treatment as a monolith of purely Western practices.