Appealing to the Republic of Letters: An Autopsy of Anti-venereal Trials in Eighteenth-century Mexico

作者：Clark Fiona^*

来源：Social History of Medicine, 2014, 27(1): 2-21.

DOI：10.1093/shm/hkt045

• venereal disease
• Mexico
• republic of letters
• eighteenth century
• France

This study analyses the narrative elements of a little-known report into anti-venereal trials written by an Irish military physician-surgeon, Daniel O%26apos;Sullivan (1760-c.1797). It explores the way in which O%26apos;Sullivan as the narrator of the Historico-critical report creates medical heroes and antiheroes as a means to criticise procedures initiated by staff in the Hospital General de San Andres, Mexico City. The resulting work depicts a much less positive picture of medical trials and hospital authorities in this period than has been recorded to date, and provides a critical and complicated assessment of one of Spain%26apos;s leading physicians of the nineteenth century, Francisco Javier Balmis (1753-1819).

• 出版日期2014-2