This volume offers a new annotated translation, also with a new
introduction, of the Dialogue on the True Medicine, one of a series of
dialogues published in 1587 as Nueva Filosofia de la Naturaleza del
Hombre (New Philosophy of Human Nature), under the name of Oliva
Sabuco de Nantes Barrera. Believed for centuries to be a woman's work,
the book was attributed to Oliva's father, Miguel Sabuco, in the early
twentieth century, and its authorship remains a matter of controversy
today. Sabuco's work is one of the most intriguing texts of
sixteenth-century medicine. Defined by its author as "a book that was
missing in the world," the work proposes a new ambitious medical theory
challenging the humoral view of disease and the main tenets of Galenic
physiology.
This annotated translation allows the reader to locate the Dialogue on
the True Medicine in the context of early modern medical and
philosophical culture, identifying Sabuco's ancient and modern sources.
The editor's introduction reviews the contested issue of authorship,
offers new documentation for the history of the reception of Sabuco's
ideas in the seventeenth century, and relates Sabuco's work to the
Querelle des femmes, the protofeminist debate which had remarkable
echoes in early modern medicine.