Puer barbatus: Precocious Puberty in Early Modern Medicine.

During early modernity, medico-legal concerns with timing puberty gave way to physiological and medical-hygienic concerns with pubertal timing. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical-jurisprudential tracts isolated rare cases of conception before the legal marriage age. Scattered reports of "monstrously" early menarche and "prodigious" male puberty were offered from the latter half of the seventeenth century. Tied to excess heat, moisture, plethora and climate since antiquity, in the second half of the eighteenth century pubertal timing attracted sustained commentary regarding the purported role of social stressors, from novel-reading to diet and trousers. Both the known variability and strikingly outlying instances of pubertal timing thus provided an inroad to unravelling such perennial explanatory devices as temperament, constitution, and life style. Despite and in part because of its explanatory significance in early modern physiology, leading eighteenth-century nosologists did not yet itemize precocious puberty. One precocious boy described in the 1740s, the Willingham Prodigy, provided the best documented early medical and public response. Formal nosological interest followed by the 1760s, initially under Haller's heading of excessive growth (incrementum nimium, tied to enhanced circulation) and only much later under Meckel the Younger's heading of premature development (vorschnelle Entwicklung).

Male precocious puberty described in literature of the Spanish Golden Age.

Aristotle was the first author who described the existence of abnormalities in the timing of human puberty. In the classic Greek-Roman period, Pliny the Elder and Phlegon of Tralles described the first individual cases of precocious puberty in children. During the Middle Ages, precocious puberty in the male (but not in the female) was ignored. We present what is, to our knowledge, the first full description in European literature of male precocious puberty and its consequences in an adult. This case is included in a book of the miscellaneous genre of Spanish Renaissance literature (Jardin de Flores Curiosas) written by Antonio de Torquemada in the sixteenth century.

Sexual precocity: a historical perspective and update.

Puberty is the interval in the life cycle during which the child becomes an adult. It is heralded by physical changes such as acceleration of linear growth and appearance of secondary sexual characteristics, capped by attainment of reproductive capability, and orchestrated by increases in the secretion of hypothalamic, pituitary, and gonadal hormones. This article discusses selected historical and contemporary aspects of isosexual precocious puberty, i.e., the development of sexual characteristics prior to the usual age of pubertal onset.

[My interpretation as a pediatrician of "Las Meninas"]. / Mi interpretación pediátrica de "Las Meninas".

Las Meninas from Velázquez is one of the most important pictures in the world nevertheless, there is not an interpretation out of doubt of his meaning, in spite of all the studies written about it. After an original study of the history of Las Meninas, the persons painted, what are they doing, the Spanish culture on the time in what was painted and the historical life of the Infanta Margarita, the central personage of the picture, the author arrives to the conclusion about the possibility that she had a precocious puberty.