Medical Pluralism in the Iberian Kingdoms: The Control of Extra-academic Practitioners in Valencia

Over the last several decades, historians of medicine have grown increasingly interested in the coexistence of medical systems, a phenomenon known as medical pluralism. While medical pluralism is not at all uncommon in present-day societies, Robert J€utte remarks that it is relatively recently that medical historiography has shifted the emphasis from renowned doctors and orthodox practitioners to the more complex world of medical practice, to include all manner of healers involved in confronting illness. However, the study of this complex world—while indispensable to a full comprehension of the medical practices of any period—presents a number of challenges to traditional medical historiography. For example, the fact that practitioners of folk medicine, charismatic healers, and the like left behind relatively few documents means that we must turn to the systems of control to understand extra-official health practices (i.e. those practices that are neither regulated by nor included within legal frameworks). For this reason, a variety of new historiographical models have been developed, each with its own terms and concepts for the purposes of, on the one hand, properly interpreting and analysing medical pluralism historically and, on the other, methodologically resolving the problems this phenomenon presents, particularly the dichotomy between academic and non-academic medicine. These models make use of tools that previously pertained exclusively to social and political history in order to include not only academic medicine but also unregulated and unorthodox practices. In this way, these models help to account for all the options that existed for the treatment of sickness. In the case of early modern Spain, medical pluralism involves the coexistence of academic medicine—the Galenism taught in universities to physicians, surgeons