Sexual Difference and the Uterus in Luis Mercado, Rodrigo de Castro, and Zacuto Lusitano

Many treatises on gynaecology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describe the uterus as the cause of women’s diseases, according to a perspective inherited from the Hippocratic Corpus and Aretaeus. Simultaneously, however, and in a more positive view much indebted to Galen, its position, form and functions were presented as the admirable work of a wise nature that does nothing at random. In this paper, I aim to analyse the tension resulting from the coexistence of these two perspectives in Luis Mercado’s, Rodrigo de Castro’s, and Zacuto Lusitano’s treatises on women’s diseases and how the tension between the two is articulated with these authors’ views on sexual difference. Common to the three is an evident effort to aggrandise the subject of their treatises and to present women’s medical care as a particularly challenging area of expertise in which the medical author is a key authoritative character.