[[Medical practice in the virtual space: Long distance relationships between Juan Munoz y Peralta (1665-1746) and his patients].]

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, it was a common practice to send consultation letters to physicians, particularly to renowned ones. Accessing the virtual space of correspondence was for the patients in many cases the final stage of a long therapeutic itinerary or the attempt to overcome the geographical distance that arouse out of different motives between the practitioner and the sick. From early modern Spain, very few patient letters have survived to the present days. A great exception are the letters addressed to the physician Juan Munoz y Peralta (1665-1746). As a royal physician and the first president of the "Royal Society of Medicine and other Sciences of Seville", Spain's first scientific academy, Munoz y Peralta was an outstanding figure of the Spanish "Novator" movement, promoting the modern medicine. Today, the National Historic Archive preserves a collection of 67 letters, written between 1709 and 1721 by men and women to the physician Peralta. The aim of this paper is to analyse these letters in order to reconstruct from the very perspective of the patient why and how they initiated a correspondence with Peralta as well as their attitudes towards the different therapeutic offers that ranged between the traditional and the modern. Crucially, it wvill examine the physician-patient relationship that came into being in a very particular setting: the virtual space correspondence.