Abstracts Archive

My paper intends to explore the impact of translation practices on the construction of female authority in one particular vernacular tradition. My approach traces how late medieval Catalan medicine articulated its own notion of female medical authority by acknowledging, adapting and erasing Latin id...

Historians have debated the ways in which Old World cultures were transformed, merged, and informed one another in colonial spaces like the Caribbean. My research shows that healing rituals using water were part of creolized discourses that bridged physical and spiritual worlds. This paper uses both...

When Descartes equated animals with machines in Discourse on Method (1637), he did not anticipate that he opened the door to mechanical materialists. While very few adopted radical mechanism, mechanistic conceptions of the human body nonetheless manifested in many arenas in early modern Europe, incl...

In making an attempt to explore the “medical incentives” and the “interests of the capitalist agencies” involved in the project in locating the vectors of diseases prevailed in the Assam tea plantations of British India, the paper argues that ideas of medical welfare was instrumental both in...

Despite extensive work on the history of medical instruments, the material turn has been slow to arrive in the history of medicine. Paradoxically, the materiality of medical objects and their practices is inseparable from their function. Designed to enact and control the violation of corporeal and p...

This paper aims to discuss the medical practices in the cocoa plantations of São Tomé, a Portuguese colony in the Gulf of Guinea. As in other contexts, São Tomé’s plantations were dependent on large contingents of displaced black laborers, framed by different institutions from slavery to inden...

The public display of wax anatomical models in eighteenth-century Italy attracted Grand Tourists and was intended to contribute to the Enlightenment project of cultivating virtue and the public good. Not all anatomical models were destined for wide public consumption, however. This paper examines ob...

How do textual practices function to make sense out of large data sets, when that “data” is not “given,” but rather narrated in extended prose form? Known as “cases,” “observations,” or “facts,” extended textual chunks formed a key currency of the human sciences into the twentiet...

Medical research-, educational-, and public health films have recently been rediscovered by archives and scholars in different fields. The institutional turn to the proper production and distribution of medical films in Austria starts with the founding of the Staatliche Filmhauptstelle in Vienna in ...

Within museum studies, there has been a recent interest in engaging with objects and their material effects as something other than vehicles for human cultural meaning, arguing that there has been a tendency to miss out of “an examination of the physical actuality of objects and the sensory modali...

Images of flayed human bodies, so-called écorché figures, occur with some frequency in artistic and anatomical handbooks from the sixteenth century onwards. Three-dimensional écorché models (‘anatomies’) sculpted in wood or wax are also occasionally listed in artist’s and collector’s inv...

In this panel, we aim to discuss the study of plants in different contexts, periods, and areas from Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern world. The recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of the study of vegetation in diverse areas of human activity, thereby suggesting that the claim that ...

This paper focuses on integrating African vernacular knowledge about malaria more fully into the history of science, the history of malaria elimination attempts, the history of global health interventions and current elimination activities. In order to do so, it focuses on the the Indian Ocean islan...

Different forms of corporeal improvement emerged between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Humanists, like Erasmus of Rotterdam, tried to educate the elite and rulers in books like his how-to manual ‘Institutio Principis Christiani’ (1516) dedicated to Prince Charles, the future Emperor Cha...

In 1935, Stanley Smith Stevens published two articles in which he urged for a revolution in psychology. Building on P.W. Bridgman’s methodological prescriptions for physicists, Stevens argued that all psychological concepts need to be strictly defined in terms of public operations. If psychology i...

At the turn of the twentieth century, hundreds of Christian Scientists, including their founder Mary Baker Eddy, were charged with insanity owing to their religion. As a new religion, Christian Science became part of the medically-sanctioned etiology of insanity at the time. Newspapers were swift to...

My paper engages with a rather specific and yet understudied case of natural irregularity: the phenomenon of monstrous births within the Medieval Jewish tradition. How did Premodern Jewish scientists and philosophers consider bodily defects that were evidently disagreeing with the regularity of Natu...

Locke’s career has been increasingly recognized by historians as contributing not only to the history of philosophy but also to the history of science and medicine. Over his life Locke engaged with medical practice (working with the prominent physician Thomas Sydenham) as well as with natural phil...

This paper investigates how scientists and film-makers at the Yale Clinic of Child Development redefined normal child development and established norms of human behavior and social interaction. Part of the evolving science of child development in the interwar years, these researchers sought techniqu...

At the close of the nineteenth century, a writer in the Lancet commented that ‘Sleeplessness is one of the torments of our age and generation’. He thus articulated the perception, which had been the source of mounting cultural and medical anxiety over the previous decades, that the conditions of...

Allen’s book entitled David Hartley on Human Nature (1999) gives a careful review of the works and life of the physician and philosopher David Hartley (1705-1757). However, there has been no thorough study of the role of nerves in the naturalisation of the mind in Hartley’s work. This latter, in...

In cases of infanticide, forensic medicine has always played an important role, examining the baby’s and the mother’s body. The mother’s mind and her emotional state were to some extent relevant in the nineteenth-century courtroom, but in the twentieth century psychiatry gained more influence ...

"Dark figure” means estimating and calculating the number of unreported or undiscovered crimes and is therefore a statistic of hidden yet ostensibly real occurrences. The terms names something that mostly evades general knowledge and counting, and often instills angst. “Dark figures” are figur...

In 1726, the Spanish Benedictine friar Benito J. Feijoo (1676-1764), in his best-seller Teatro Crítico Universal, defended women’s intellectual capacities. Analysing medical and philosophical theories about how ideas were produced, he argued that female bodies (cold and humid) were perfectly suit...

The discovery of Burkitt’s lymphoma (BL), a childhood cancer that appeared to be limited to particular parts of Africa and caused by a virus, attracted a range of researchers with a stake in the field of cancer viruses to Uganda. Between 1962 and 1979, the East African Virus Research Institute (EA...

Using case studies of nineteenth-century anatomical model making and use, this paper seeks to challenge/interrogate current historiography concerning the role of anatomical representations for modernity. Following particular readings of Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge, historians’ interpre...

In this paper, I investigate conceptualizations of the moral agency and personhood of infants in nineteenth-century American medical and pedagogical texts to disentangle the interweaving of hegemonic religious, scientific, and philosophical conceptions of children and childhood during the nineteenth...

During the 17th and 18th centuries a network of Chinese savants, interested in studying Arabo-Persian natural philosophy strove to reconcile conceptual and theoretical differences between the traditional Chinese and Arabo-Persian treatments of the natural world. For that end, members of that Sino-Is...

After conducting path-breaking experiments on introducing token economies in mental hospitals, Australian psychologist Robin Winkler spent a sabbatical in the United States (1970-1971). There, he became acquainted with anti-psychiatry and initiatives in community mental health. After returning to Au...

In 1700 the Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini published the first treatise on the Diseases of Artisans. Originally published in Latin, the text was soon translated into several languages and annotated, updated and republished several times in the course of three centuries. Ramazzini, referred i...