La Pràctica mèdica a la Catalunya del segle XVIII

Abstract

The institutional forms of a medical tradition developed by the city of Barcelona throughout the 16th and 17th centuries are taken as starting point of this research. The war of Succession and the reforms carried out on this matter by the Bourbon authorities not only broke the former tradition but also did not lay its foundations in any project of scientific renewal. This thesis studies the strategies developed, in the margin of the professional model imposed, by the Catalan medical practitioners from the middle of the century, by looking at the project, and its representatives, that searched for a new kind of medical professionalization in the context of a new insertion of the Catalan society into the Spanish crown. This research also poses the question of how university medicine did spread in Catalonia through the study of the municipal engagement of medical practitioners and the urban friendly societies that provided mutual help in times of sickness and death.