Convulsions, Palsy, and the Spanish Inquisition: Neurologic Cases in an Overlooked Historical Archive.
Spanish Inquisition archives contain over 80 documented neurologic and neuropsychiatric cases.
Convulsions, Palsy, and the Spanish Inquisition: Neurologic Cases in an Overlooked Historical Archive.
A largely unrecognized feature of the Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834) was the mandatory medical evaluation of all defendants, generating a vast archive of clinical documentation that remains almost entirely unexplored by historians of neurology.
Drawing on published scholarship and targeted searches of the Spanish national archives, we identified over 80 cases related to neurology and neuropsychiatric content.
In this article, we analyze 7 of them, for illustrative purposes, involving convulsions (termed aferecía or gota coral ), palsy and paralysis ( perlesía ), and miscellaneous brain pathology ( leso de la cabeza , cerebro débil y flaco ), documented between 1562 and 1700.
These records reveal a tripartite diagnostic framework (physician, surgeon, and exorcist) that evolved over 2 centuries and often favored naturalistic medical explanations.
The Inquisition archives merit further investigation as a potential source for the history of clinical neurology in the early modern period.