In 1770, Charles III of Spain issued a royal decree to overhaul the university system throughout his kingdom. As part of this overhaul, a range of reforms were instituted to modernize anatomical and medical studies thereby placing Spanish science on a more secure footing with the rest of Europe. During this period of transformation, the study of life and death and the emergence of new developments in the practice of resuscitation opened promising avenues of research for exploring the wonders of the human body. Yet, as Fernández-Medina will argue through the work of some of Spain’s foremost physicians and thinkers, it also sparked one of the fiercest debates in the Spanish Enlightenment on the expansion of scientific knowledge and its role in modern society.

Professor Fernández-Medina specializes in late eighteenth- to early twentieth-century Spanish literature, philosophy, and intellectual history, including Enlightenment thought, philosophy of science and the body, social history of ideas in medicine, modernist aesthetics, and the avant-garde.

He is the author of Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2018), Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy (co-edited with Maria Truglio, New York: Routledge, 2016), and The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado’s ‘Proverbios y cantares’ (U of Wales P, 2011). His current book, Raising the Dead: The Science and Literature of Resuscitation in Spain explores Spanish modernity’s unending fascination with the life/death divide and analyzes the numerous social narratives of existence and mortality that have shaped Spain’s cultural imaginary.