La construcción de los saberes pandémicos: metáforas y culturas de la enfermedad en la Edad Moderna

In all ages, diseases and their epidemic manifestation have been a challenge for the societies that, once affected, were forced to seek explanations to the ill causes as quickly as possible and to develop containment mechanisms and methods of treatment and cure. Despite the ideas associated with certain diseases, these are meaningless themselves: they acquire meaning only thanks to the intellectual framework in which they born and from which they are interpreted. Illness and its healing methods have been explained in diverse ways in different spaces and times. The ideas associated to illness have done a long travel through time until seeing incorporated in a determine culture, that accepted these concepts with more or less resistance and that integrated them in their respective medical traditions throughout diverse mechanisms. The knowledge born in the field of medicine was disseminated thanks to the mobility of actors of very diverse origins and social backgrounds (doctors, soldiers, healers, surgeons, barbers, missionaries, etc.) who, in their travels, not only transported their own experience, but also enriched and reconstructed it with new elements learned in the places they visited. In this presentation we will reflect on the role of culture, the circulation of subjects and the connections in the construction of pandemic knowledge in history, focusing particularly on the 16th and 17th centuries, the period of the so-called “great European expansion”, of cultural exchanges on a global scale and of the development of technology and the scientific revolution