Medicine of the passions in 19th century Spain

This article explores the important place occupied by the passions in the theoretical discourses and professional rhetoric of 19(th) century Spanish medicine. In order to expand their explanatory and therapeutic resources and, above all, to endorse their competence as experts in the study and management of the passions, Spanish physicians adopted and promulgated a number of postulates in this regard, including the relevance of physiological research, and the importance of pathogenic effects, social risks, clinical semiology, differential diagnosis and therapy. These not only laid the conceptual foundations for emerging disciplines and practices such as psychiatry, hygiene and moral therapy, but can also be seen, in retrospect, as anticipating central assumptions of modern sciences of the mind. However, this medicalisation of the passions led them to be gradually discredited in favour of the concept of the emotions (allegedly more physiological and lacking moral connotations and therefore more objective). By the end of the 19th century, the passions had almost disappeared from scientific discourses on affectivity and the psyche.