The Body of the Letter: Vital Force and the Practice of Spanish Medicine in Juan de Cabriada's "Carta Filosofica, Medico-Chymica" (1687)

According to J. M. López Piñero, the critic who has attempted the most comprehensive appraisal of Cabriada's oeuvre, the Carta represents "el manifiesto de la renovación en Españadela medicina y los saberes biológicos y qúimicos relacionados con ella" ("Juan de Cabriada y el movimiento novator" 4). More directly, Cabriada's exordium introduces those fundamental binaries that govern his letter: moderno/antiguo, verdad/ignorancia, and yo/ellos (the junta). [...]he professes his allegiance to modern iatrochemistry and to "Autores Modernos" who labor to comprehend the natural world using as their principal tools observation and reason (n. pag.). Subtexts serve as signposts that build up in the text ("successive variants") to provide another level of coherence to its core meanings. [...]the subtext is not, nor should it be regarded as, an instance of rearticulation, but rather it "always constitutes a second reading of what the text surrounding it is about. . [...]Cabriada's Carta not only challenges the epistemology that undergirded the medical establishment in Spain by wielding the establishment's own therapeutic reasoning against itself, but it also places before the reader a series of questions concerning what constitutes the mysterious vital force that makes us who we are.