"Though I Speak with the Tongues of Men and of Angels ...": Rhetorical Practices in Nineteenth-Century Religious and Medical Discourse‪.‬

This essay examines a variety of medical and religious texts from mid-nineteenth-century Spain. It explores the degree to which their writing--as a medium that betrays more than a simple message of content--indicates to us how far they were allied to other social authorities, and specifically to the Church, in a power structure sealed by language. In addition, these texts demonstrate that professional writing intended for popular dissemination had common elements of approach and expression that transcended disciplinary or confessional boundaries. Both medical and religious texts reveal a high level of concern with maintaining positions of authority. This is partly related to issues of social power (the habitual implied audiences of such texts being women, children, and the lower classes). At the same time, the concern with power provides exemplification of anxieties about gender and degeneration, against which the structures and skills of rhetoric are brought in as weapons of control. The body of the essay examines the ways in which the two fields of discourse converge, so that the Church speaks of matters of health while medical texts borrow theological terminology. This convergence is revealed further in the authorities they cite, and in their approach to linguistic register. Both employ Latin and complex syntax as ploys to exclude the unlettered and to designate an implied minority readership. The project of control of the readership through rhetoric is revealed as a prime reason for using it. At the same time, as revealed in later-nineteenth-century texts, the emotive powers of rhetoric contain the potential for a counter-control movement that stands in tension with the initial use of rhetoric to assert social power. **********