Meditsina, nauka, novye sposoby myshleniya v pireneyskom mire v epokhu prosveshcheniya

Striking attempts were made in Iberia and Ibero-America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to understand human life in a different way and to improve living conditions for ordinary people. Governments and intellectuals, lay and ecclesiastical, in the two colonial powers, Spain and Portugal, actively took part in these endeavours, which also extended to their overseas territories, notably in the Americas. Similarly, Ibero-American scholars developed their own expressions of the Enlightenment, sometimes independently and other times in concert with colonial officials. Sooner or later, the new ideas would advance from the scientific sphere into the very different spheres of economic policy and political organization. This, in turn, raised the question of the linkage between Enlightenment and Revolution. While this latter is not the subject of the present discussion, it is important to understand that decades of armed conflict, economic dislocation, and political instability between the 1810s and 1870s halted and even reversed the developments which had begun during the eighteenth century. They would be resumed in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This helps to explain why it took until the 1890s and 1900s to resolve the problem of the cause of two of the most harmful of tropical diseases: malaria and yellow fever. [1,2].

Iberian world, medicine, science, enlightenment, independence