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In order to know about diseases and their medical treatment from the perspective of the patient in Baroque Spanish society, creative literature, especially the picaresque novel, is a valuable source that offers a representation of ideas on medicine and disease that were widespread among the population and difficult to access from other sources. The first-person narrative in the Vida y hechos de Estebanillo González (1646) offers knowledge on three different aspects of the medical world in Europe during the Thirty Years' War: Estebanillo practises various medical professions, appears in the story as a patient and comments on health practices and disease, providing highly useful material to analyze how different fields of medicine are represented in this literary work.

In this article we explore how the Spanish written press--ABC, La Vanguardia, and Blanco y Negro--and the official newsreel No-Do, created and disseminated a narrative about heart transplantations at the end of the 1960s. We consider how Franco's regime used Christiaan Barnard's heart transplants to legitimize the Spanish dictatorship and as a means of signifying scientific progress, modernization and national pride. The Spanish press created the plot of the first transplantations like that of a television series, presenting daily installments on the patients' progress, dramatizing the stories and ensuring the public's emotional attachment. The three main characters in the story: donors, patients and surgeons, formed a symbolic, indivisible narrative triangle endowed with singular meaning. This Spanish narrative of organ transplant technology was deployed through what we have called "a tale of two countries", that, emulating the South African's success, constructed in Martínez-Bordiú, Franco's son-in-law, a home-grown, masculine scientific personality capable of performing heart surgery and endorsing Franco's investment in scientific modernization., (© The Author(s) 2013.)

Whereas traditional social and health histories have viewed the garments of early modern patients accessing hospital care as evidence of their poverty, this article reinterprets the meaning of patient clothing in the context of a venereal disease hospital in Toledo, Spain, in the seventeenth century. Patients carefully selected what they wore as they entered the hospital to produce certain effects on local audiences. Thus, these choices can be understood as body scripts meant to be read in certain ways rather than mere reflections of actual social status. In a context of gendered and social pressures associated with women's sexuality, female syphilitic patients wore garments meant to emphasize respectability and thereby avoid a loss of reputation.

This study investigates the staffing by physicians of the "Hospital Real" in the city of Granada in the 16th century, focusing on the selection processes that preceded their respective and successive appointments. The aim is to illustrate the determination shown by this class of professionals to claim this healthcare space and the academic and socio-cultural requirements that they had to meet in return. These included the possession of a university degree and the accreditation of reputable surgical experience and, to a lesser degree, "limpieza de sangre" (proof of Spanish Christian ancestry) and the title of physician awarded by the local court of the Inquisition.

This article explores the history of the San Juan de Dios Hospital in Cartagena de Indias, at the end of the 18th century. Its activities and evolution cannot be understood unless they are analyzed within the context of the Bourbon sanitary reforms. it was precisely at that time when these reforms were being implemented in Nueva Granada. One of the goals of the reforms was to improve the health of the population in order to discipline the vassals, to promote the growth of the workforce and to increase the Crown's wealth. The text reviews different aspects of the institution, and how it operated. It examines the budget, its expenses, and the dynamics of the hospital population and of its employees. In doing so, it intends to explain what the hospital offered to the city's various social groups.