In this paper I will present a collection of secrets gathered between around 1660 and 1730 in the Oratorian house on the rue Saint-Honoré, the heart of Paris’s growing culture of consumption. While the identities of receipt authors and compilers cannot often be ascertained, studying the collection as a material technology allows a focus on the intersection between curing and being cured, shopping and healing, and the relationships between medical self-help and communal medical practice. In the priestly world, such practice spanned across the charitable, domestic and commercial domains; I will argue that collective autoexperimentation allowed the performance of other categories of medical practitioner to be scrutinised and critically evaluated. The ‘paper tools’ of the Oratorians show how the practice of cure—the arts of the body—depended on the ability of healers to shift knowledge between the individual body, epistolary/natural philosophical networks, books and the material object of the ’secret’.

Surgeons were key agents in the medicalization of early modern Italy, where a sophisticated medical economy combined medicinal consumerism with a widespread culture of hygiene. From the modest bloodletter up to the university-trained surgeon, they provided all kinds of health and beauty treatment for the urban society, including its lower strata. Excellent studies have delved into the Italian tradition of Renaissance learned surgery. In contrast, with few exceptions (notably S. Cavallo), the culture, work and intellectual output of the common practitioners remain largely unexplored. Although they are unanimously viewed as go-betweens, relatively little attention has been devoted to the role played by surgeons in sustaining medicalization across different social groups, as well as in promoting change in the physiological and pathological ideas that underpinned it. This paper aims at bridging this historiographical gap. By analysing printed surgical books in the period 1650-1800 both as texts and objects, it tackles the circulation of surgical knowledge in multiple audiences and the social diversification of health care, while shedding light on surgeons’ strategies of self-fashioning according to their background and professional profile. Manuscripts, however, reveal other aspects and trajectories of this process. Indeed, in this same period, manuscript surgical texts – transcripts of lectures, compendia, surgery casebooks- continued to be produced and circulated. I will argue that they offer new insight into the evolution of surgical culture, as well as into the ways it was transmitted and appropriated by different milieus.

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 in his time as the third Hippocrates, rose to fame again in the twentieth century as the “father of occupational medicine,” with medical institutions and journals named after him. This paper will shift the focus away from Ramazzini to discuss instead the success of the Diseases of Artisans in the context of the early modern interest in artisans’ bodies as repositories of practical knowledge and material intelligence. I will argue that Diseases of Artisans was not just a medical text but also a sort of costume book that merged pathology and physiognomy. While contemporary works on artisans represented the arts through tools, materials and artefacts, Diseases of Artisans characterized each craft by the kind of body that its practitioners acquired because of their exposure to specific substances or repetitive actions.

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 inventories from this period. However, écorchés cast in metal or plaster did not become a staple in the artist’s workshop and the anatomy classroom until the eighteenth century. How did eighteenth-century artisans of the body, both visual artists and anatomists, collaborate in the creation of these écorché models? Why did one model in particular, jointly created by a Scottish anatomist and a Danish artist, become so popular and was reproduced so often that it became the écorché model? This paper seeks to answer these questions and explores how the living and dead bodies involved in creating these objects – those of artists, anatomists, and their involuntary human models – interacted in complex ways and were valued very differently in the production process. The author argues that the introduction of serially produced, small écorché models in metal and plaster rather than wood or wax in the eighteenth century reflects a significant shift in the way three-dimensional models of the human body were created and used in both the production and the transmission of anatomical knowledge.

Between the 1730s and the 1760s, a number of large bones were found in the Ohio River valley. They were widely believed to be the remains of ancient elephants that had been washed to North America by the Deluge; Buffon and Daubenton also concluded that these were elephant bones. In the 1760s, some of these bones came to London, and to the attention of the anatomist William Hunter (1718-1783). Hunter drew on a wide circle of acquaintances, including collectors, naturalists, fellow anatomists, and craftsmen in ivory, and determined that the bones were not from elephants but from another larger elephant-like animal that was now extinct. His conclusions, published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1768, were among the first to acknowledge the fact of extinction.