Sexuality and social order: the medical stance in Spain in the first third of the 19th century

Abstract

The last decades of the 18th and first years of the 19th centuries represent one of the most significant periods for the relationship between Medicine and Politics. Physicians became explicitly aware of the usefulness of their knowledge for the maintenance of law and order in the State and hence began to claim participation in legislative tasks. This article intends to demostrate that Spanish physicians were not immune against these ideas. The works of two Spanish medical doctors —Ramón López Mateos and Francisco Fabra— represent the attempt to provide the legal profession with the fundaments to establish a law code based on the medical knowledge of the time about man. Among the recommendations about what should be permitted or forbidden in order to ensure the good functioning of a community, indispensable reference was made to the role of the two sexes in society and the sex life of the citizens. Hence the work of these two authors can be taken as a contribution to the disemination of a sexuality model which the ever more powerfull bourgeoisie, represented by these physicians, endeavoured to establish.