Maxime Guttin
Jan Becker
Timo Houtekamer
17.03.2023
Deborah Coen — Climate Risk: Historical Reflection on a Vulnerable Science
A Talk by Deborah Coen
In Sala del Torrino (Villa Salviati), 17 March 2023, 11:00 – 13:00 CETAbstract: This presentation uses history to illuminate a profound misalignment between today’s science of climate change and the goals of climate justice. A fundamental ambivalence lies at the heart of the current scientific discourse around human “vulnerability” to climate change. This presentation argues that the scientists who set out in the late 1970s to study human vulnerability to climate change ended up — ironically and largely unintentionally — constructing an ideal of climatic invulnerability. To diagnose this problem, I draw on a diverse set of late twentieth-century feminist thinkers who critiqued a tendency within “Western thought” to idealise invulnerability. In doing so, I also hope to situate these feminist thinkers as historical actors within a long history of confronting—and denying—the vulnerability of humans to the atmosphere.
About the speaker: Deborah Coen is a professor of History and Chair of the Program in History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. For her latest book Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale, she received the Pfizer prize in 2019.
19.04.2023
Nuno–Castel Branco — Thinking the Earth with the Body: How Anatomist Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686) Read History in the Earth’s Strata
A talk by Nuno-Castel Branco
In Sala del Torrino (Villa Salviati) 19 April 2023, 15:00 – 17:00 CESTAbstract: In 1669, Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686) argued that the Earth has a history and that this history can be known through a series of rules today known as “Steno Principles of Stratigraphy.” This presentation shows that Steno’s research on the Earth is intrinsically related to his anatomical studies of the body. Most accounts associate Steno’s turn to fossils and the Earth with the dissection of a great white shark for the Medici court in the fall of 1666 in Florence. Instead, I argue that Steno shifted his interests after reading an almost-hundred-year-old manuscript about fossils that directly contradicted his research methods. By reading Steno’s studies of the Earth in light of his anatomical writings and unpublished manuscripts, this talk problematizes the category of polymathy in early modern science. I also present early modern anatomy as a powerful discipline that influences other areas of knowledge, including a contribution to the idea of a world ordered by same natural laws.
About the speaker: Nuno Castel-Branco is a historian of early modern culture and science at The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti). He is particularly interested in the social and intellectual reasons behind the interaction of mathematics with disciplines such as physics, medicine and theology
24.05.2023
Katharine Gerbner – Obeah/Science African epistemologies, slavery, and the criminalisation of knowledge in the Atlantic Worlds
In Sala del Torrino (Villa Salviati), 11:00-13:00 CEST
Abstract: Katharine Gerbner’s presentation will examine the relationship between “Obeah” and “Science” as they emerged historically within the context of Atlantic slavery and imperialism. “Obeah”, an Afro-Caribbean term, is notoriously difficult to define, and it has been described alternately as “medicine,” “witchcraft,” and “religion.” In 1760, Obeah was criminalised following Tacky’s revolt, the largest slave uprising in the British Atlantic world, and it remains a crime in Jamaica. Today, Obeah and Science are widely recognised as connected terms throughout the anglophone Caribbean, a fascinating correlation that is only beginning to gain attention in academic writing.
In her presentation, Gerbner will examine the evolving relationship between Obeah and Science before and after Obeah was criminalised. First, using previously unexamined documents from the Moravian missionary archives, she offers new insight into Obeah before the practice was deemed a crime. Second, she uses colonial archival sources to show how the criminalisation of Obeah was part of a broader effort to criminalise Africana epistemologies in the British Atlantic World. Finally, Gerbner examines the adoption of the term “Science” by Obeah practitioners in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Throughout, she asks questions about authority and the archive; historical methods; and the politics of knowledge in the context of slavery and imperialism.
About the speaker: Katharine Gerbner’s research explores the religious dimensions of race, authority, and freedom in the early modern Atlantic world. Her book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World shows how debates between slave-owners, black Christians, and missionaries transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race in the early modern Atlantic World: She is broadly interested in how Afro-Caribbean ideas about healing, prayer, and worship influenced the construction of European categories such as religion and medicine.
12.06.2023
Suman Seth – A Decided Inaptitude in his Constitution: Race, Slavery, Disability in the Nineteenth Century British Empire
A talk by Suman Seth
In Sala del Torrino (Villa Salviati), 12 June 2023, 10:00 – 12:00 CESTAbstract: At its core are a series of reports on military medical statistics, principally authored by Alexander Tulloch, that would become the backbone for a swathe of subsequent claims about the reality and numerical value of race. Tulloch’s Statistical Reports drew on his earlier (1837) statistical defense of plantation owners’ treatment of the enslaved, published only a few years after the formal abolition of slavery. In those Reports, Tulloch made an argument for the inability of Africans to adapt to climates far removed from those of their homelands. Enough has been stated, he wrote in 1840, to afford another striking instance how unfitted is the constitution of the Negro for any other climate than that in which he is the native. White bodies, by contrast, were hyper-able. Africans, by Tulloch’s logic, could travel to relatively few places safely, while Europeans – committed to a range of settler colonial projects- could claim a swathe of the world as their domain, even if the tropics remained a graveyard.
About the speaker: Professor Suman Seth works on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of science and medicine. His interests include the history of medicine, race, and colonialism, the physical sciences (particularly quantum theory), & gender and science. He is the author of Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926 (MIT, 2010). He has served as the guest editor of a special issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies on “Science, Colonialism, Postcolonialism” (December, 2009) and of a ‘Focus’ Section of the Journal Isis on ‘Re-Locating Race.’ He is coeditor (with Prof. Patrick McCray) of the Journal Osiris.
11.01.2023
Luana Salvarani — Mental Faculties and the Brain between Galenism and Renaissance Politics: A reading from Juan Huarte’s Examen de ingenios
08.02.2023
Mattia Della Rocca – Environment and Information: What is alive and what is dead in J.J. Gibson ecological theory of perception
01.03.2023
Noga Arikha — How far down does top-down go? Franz Boas between psychology and anthropology
08.03.2023
Guido Giglioni – How Not to Trust Your Own Mind: From Bacon to Locke
Throughout this year (2022-2023), the HoSM Working Group invited four professors based in Italian universities to speak about the various histories of the human mind.
In the first lecture titled Mental Faculties and the Brain Between Galenism and Renaissance Politics, Luana Salvarani (Università di Parma) presented a study and a translation of Juan Huarte’s Examen de ingenious. This treaty dating from the end of the 16th Century Spain was at the crossroads of the history of education and the history of the mind. Building on earlier conceptions of the brain and its faculties, this work help us understand the extent to which the brain was linked to a peculiar conception of the mind. It also displays the political nature of the mind in relation to the formations and identifications of social elites during this period.
From this account of the human mind from the perspective of the history of anatomy and the history of education, the second talk, by Mattia Della Rocca (Università Tor Vergata), took us to the history of ideas about perception. In this lecture, Environment and Information, Mattia Della Rocca discussed James J. Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception from 1979. Through this analysis, Della Rocca presented his work in progress about the historical evolution of psychology and cognitive science. In the past two decades, historians and philosophers of psychiatry and psychology have been using a definition of the mind as the “embodied cognition”. The epistemic entitlement of this “enactive turn” are to be understood alongside their consequences on psychiatry and “abnormal” psychology. In this framework, Mattia Della Rocca’s presentation put in perspective the concept “cognitive environment” by looking at both its classical definition within behavioural environment studies and its more recent development in environmental humanities and the psychology of digital environments.
The third lecture of this series, How far down does top-down go?, by Noga Arikha (EUI) explored the anthropology of Franz Boas in a transdisciplinary perspective. There is a rich and growing body of experimental research on the “bottom-up” neural mechanisms undergirding our emotional, social and interactive lives. Straddling psychology and anthropology, this talk asked how these phenomena could be understood in “top-down” terms, as an outcome of cultural norms and family cultures that determine our implicit criteria of self-control and our relation to valenced inputs, at a more cognitive, normative level than the physiological accounts tell us.
The final lecture by Guido Giglioni and titled How Not to Trust your Own Mind: From Bacon to Locke, studied the history of philosophy about the human mind in Western Europe. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth century a crisis of the intellect led several thinkers to devise new solutions to remedy the human mind’s alleged inability to know and control reality. Bacon and Locke shared the same sceptical view about the scope and limits of the mind but moved from different premises and envisioned different solutions. Bacon referred to a technology of thinking which he understood as mirroring and echoing the material life of things. Here the model was the original identity of matter, free from the distorting mirror of the imagination (the idols) and from the diaphragm of the intellect. Locke appealed instead to an idea of consciousness and personality that gestured beyond the limits of human identity. In this view, the role of memory was crucial, for ‘recollection’ was the supreme function of consciousness. Precisely by recalling the past and anticipating the future, memory could shape one’s personal identity. By contrast, Bacon had looked at memory as a trace of knowledge imprinted in the things themselves, which first of all was record and testimony of the original formative motions of the universe, sedimented in the most ancient myths of the living cosmos. This memory Bacon called sapientia veterum and I suggest that it would be correct to call it the vetus organum of Bacon’s general programme of logic
17.02 / 24.02 / 03.03 / 17.03 2022
Histories of Science and Medicine for the 21st-Century
In winter 2022, Professor Lauren Kassell convened a hybrid workshop on “Histories of Science and Medicine for the 21st-Century” at the European University Institute.
By Jan Becker, Timo Houtekamer and Maxime Guttin
The workshop offered a space for discussion for early-stage researchers around the world. Twenty-four researchers from the EUI and seven other universities— Cambridge, Zurich, Stockholm, Groningen, Berlin, Finland, and Hong Kong—participated. As we addressed the intertwined histories of medicine and science and their public uses, the workshop sought to reflect on science and medicine’s present and future histories.The workshop was divided into two parts, consisting of three sessions each, that focused on the historiography, the current state, and the public outreach of histories of science and medicine. Firstly, we presented a foundational and/or controversial text in our research areas. Secondly, we discussed a contemporary non-academic source invoking historical arguments that related to our own topics.
What are the histories of science and medicine for? What is the relationship between the history of science and the history of medicine? What grand narratives dominated these fields through much of the twentieth century? What has replaced them, and why? Who writes these histories, and who reads them?
Part I – Core Topics
Working in groups of three, we presented a foundational and/or disputed work in our respective field of research. By historicising these works, we contextualised their impacts on the field. Simultaneously, we traced back contemporary themes and ‘turns’ within histories of science and medicine. We thus retraced the emergence and reconfiguration of questions that historians of science and medicine posed to themselves and their objects of study.One of the topics we discussed was the role of the patient in medical history. We read texts such as Roy Porter’s ‘The Patient’s View’ (1985), Charles E. Rosenberg’s ‘The Tyranny of Diagnosis’ (2002), Katherine Rawling’s ‘She Sits All Day in the Attitude Depicted in the Photo’ (2017). Based on these foundational texts, we discussed topics like the medical encounter, agency, and the positions of patients in medical institutions. This also led to more general discussions about whom we consider as historical actors and where the non-human fits into our histories.
Connected to the medical encounter and the non-human, we also touched upon the historical construction of disease concepts. We examined Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological (1966), Rachel P. Maines’ The Technology of Orgasm (1999), and Adrian Wilson’s ‘On the History of Disease Concepts’ (2000). We talked about the historical contingency of disease concepts and the recent historiographical call to stray away from the medical encounter to account for the materiality of the illness itself.
Furthermore, many of the foundational texts we discussed showcased the Eurocentric nature of more classical approaches to the history of medicine. Past texts addressing non-European topics largely relied on a ‘diffusionist’ or ‘centre-periphery’ model, as laid out by George Basalla’s The Spread of Western Science (1967). In contrast to these interpretations, we addressed attempts at decolonising classical narratives of medicine and science by reading texts such as Chambers and Gillespie’s ‘Locality in the History of Science’ (2000), Sujit Sivasundaram’s ‘Sciences and the Global’ (2010), and Kapil Raj’s ‘Beyond Postcolonialism … and Postpositivism’ (2013). These texts suggest a turn towards a broader and more global approach to the history of knowledge.
Part II – Publics
In the workshop’s second part, we each presented a contemporary non-academic source related to our topics of interest. The material presented here ranged from written texts, such as newspaper articles, novels, and a calendar, to performances such as TV series, theatre plays, and musicals. This variety invited us to think about contemporary uses of historical concepts, the multipolarity of voices, their fragmentation, and the public role of historians.Among the material we discussed were depictions of seventeenth-century Ottoman scientists looking through telescopes, as found both in tourist shops and museums throughout Istanbul. These images, however, are not actually from the seventeenth century. In a recent essay, historian Nir Shafir points out how the telescope was well-known in the seventeenth-century Middle East, but actual miniatures of the time hardly depict such an instrument. Based on this example, we talked about whose interpretations of the past are considered legitimate and why.
Another topic we addressed was how planetary sciences recently tackled the centrality of human beings in deep histories. One illustration of this is the growing popularity of Holocene calendars. These calendars propose to replace the anthropocentric partitioning of time produced for religious and political reasons with a more universal account of the history of the Earth. Holocene calendars thus appear as a tool to relate human history to the environment, human-non-human interactions, and our planet at large.
The workshop stood under the sign of COVID. Our personal and professional experiences with the pandemic resurfaced constantly during our discussions. While medicine and science underwent rapid changes in the present, how will historians of science and medicine adapt and how will we write histories after COVID?
The pandemic altered the encounter between patients and physicians. It made broad publics familiar with the pandemic’s non-human pathogen. At the same time, COVID is to be understood in more than biomedical terms. It was and is a disputed disease. The pandemic spanned the globe, connective in some ways and profoundly disruptive in others. The workshop’s focus on patients and physicians, disease concepts, and the global offered a space to reflect on the field’s future.
COVID also redefined the public role of historians and the history of science and medicine. What can histories of science and medicine offer the public in light of medical crises? Whose voices are heard in the public sphere, and how can historians amplify those voices unheard?
Participants:
- Jan Becker (EUI)
- Philippa Carter (Cambridge)
- Allen Chandler (Cambridge)
- Eszter Csillag (Hong Kong)
- Leander Diener (Zurich)
- Tunahan Durmaz (EUI)
- Rhianna Elliott (Cambridge)
- Giorgio Ennas (Franklin University Switzerland)
- Alfred Freeborn (MPIWG Berlin)
- Maria Gago (EUI)
- Maxime Guttin (EUI)
- Timo Houtekamer (EUI)
- Yijie Huang (Cambridge)
- Jennie Junghans (EUI)
- Lauren Kassell (EUI/Cambridge)
- Gozde Kilic (EUI)
- Michaela Malmberg (Stockholm)
- Valentina Mann (Cambridge)
- Silvia Marchiori (Cambridge)
- Davide Martino (Cambridge)
- Olin Moctezuma-Burns (Cambridge)
- Rinske Vermeij (Groningen)
- Xinyi Wen (Cambridge)
- Evelina Wilson (Åbo Akademi, Turku)
- Sheryl Wombell (Cambridge)
12.09.2022
Histories of Disease in a Pandemic
(Featuring a talk by Erica Charters)
This session organised by the EUI History of Science and Medicine Working Group features a talk by Erica Charters (Oxford University).
12 September 2022
The discipline of the history of medicine has long studied epidemics as a way to understand societies. Epidemics of early modern plague and nineteenth-century cholera, for example, have been researched to analyse the economic, political, and cultural frameworks that underpin past European societies. Building on social history methodologies, these approaches consider disease as part of society, rather than as a force external to its workings. But how does living through a pandemic influence these analyses of the past?This session provides an overview of histories of disease in Europe while also reflecting on the ways that the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic shaped historical research and reflection.
04.11.2022
Medicine in Translation
History of Plague and Epidemic Disease
Seeing as it is all but impossible for a single scholar to master these many languages, we propose a primary source workshop where the participants will present, comment on and (partially or fully) translate a source text. Different, yet connected at the root, the various medical traditions will thus be brought into conversation with each other. Thus, we can see how the Galenic tradition was received and adapted in different context and societies, as well as offer a rare bird’s eye perspective on a tradition that is usually studied piecemeal. To what extent can we speak of a Galenic medicine as such? What similarities and differences emerge?
The workshop will pay particular attention to plague and epidemic disease. The term ‘plague’ itself is ripe for the sort of multilingual analysis we propose; rooted in the Galenic concept of epidemia, its many meanings, differing from language to language, represent a moving target for historians. Related and overlapping topics include infectious disease in general, legitimacy and authority in medicine, state response to disease, the concept of public health, questions of ‘cleanliness’, questions of place and geography in medicine, the relationship between health, death and religion, the role of different medical practitioners and institutions in different societies, and the relation of medical theory to practice.
Program:
11:15– 13.30 Session 1. Chair: Nahyan Fancy
Tunahan Durmaz: When Galen meets Daniel Sennert in Ottoman medical texts: Eclectic explanations from Hayâtîzâde Mustafa Feyzî Efendi’s Resâilü’l-müsfiyye li’l-emrâzi’l-müskile (Healing Treatises for Formidable Diseases)
Serra Agirman Yilmaz: A 15th Century Hippocrates in Ottoman attire
14:00 – 14:15 Tara Alberts on Osiris (vol. 37) Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds
14:15 –15:30 Session 2. Chair: Lauren Kassell
Olin Moctezuma-Burns: El Libro del Judio (1834) or Maya recipes in the time of cholera
Vigdis Andrea Evang: Triage and Treatment in De curatione pestiferorum apostematum (1476)
15:45 –17:00 Session 3. Chair: Nükhet Varlik
Valentina Pugliano: Translating’ Venetian public health to Damascus: lessons from the 1543 diary of a diplomatic doctor
Jin-Woo Choi: Ramazzini’s Oration on the Winter of 1709
Winter 2022
New Researchers (2022 Cohort) presented their work
Chiara Lacroix — Parallels between bodily and national integrity
Marie van Haaster — Between philosophy of cognition and history of consolation
Dann Grotum — “Clima” & “Climate” – (Mis)translating and historicising a concept
Mónica Morado Vázquez — Sex, Gender and the Lived Body in Early Modern Hermaphroditism
Simon Werner — Questions of Discipline, the Sociological Imagination, and Social Change in the ‘New’ Africa, c. 1940-1960
Chiara Lacroix, Marie Van Haaster, Dann Grotum , Mónica Morado Vázquez and Simon Werner presented their research projects to the working group!
Chiara Lacroix presented her research project on the parallel between bodily and national integrity. She explored three possible case-studies: abortion and sterilization; syphilis and tuberculosis; and fertility-promoting practices. Her presentation also reflected on the implications of using a universalist concept, such as bodily integrity, as an object as well as a tool of historical analysis.
Marie van Haaster explained the ways in which she engages with the field of philosophy of cognition in her research on the history of consolation. From the perspective of her research, her presentation addressed several issues about the historical method in the history of knowledge: To what extent can such theories from other disciplines (i.e philosophy of cognition) be useful in history? To what extent should they be historicized? What difference does it make in the analysis of sources?
Dann Grotum talked about his research with a presentation titled: “Clima” & “Climate” – (Mis)translating and Historicizing a Concept. Dann outlined the concept’s general history and use it to critically engage with a 2021 translation of Danish-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede’s (1686–1758) natural history manuscript in which the concept was seemingly (mis)translated.
Finally, building on her research on Sex, Gender and the Lived Body in Early Modern Hermaphroditism, Mónica Morado Vázquez presented a case-study of sodomy in Early Modern Spain. Simon Werner, with a perspective of history of the human sciences, presented a paper titled Questions of Discipline, the Sociological Imagination, and Social Change in the ‘New‘ Africa, c. 1940–1960.
25.09.2023
Camille Sallé— Économies du soin en contexte colonial: une histoire des hôpitaux dans la vice-royauté du Pérou, XVIème-XVIIème siècles
Other News and Activities
Professor Monika Baár joined the EUI on 1 September 2022 as Joint Chair in the History of East-Central Europe and South-Eastern Europe, late 19th century to the present. Professor Baár also became the co-liason professor of the History of Science and medicine Working Group.
“With my focus on disability, I wish to stand for this novel “category of otherness”, the relevance of which is not yet self-evident for everyone.”
Read Monika Baár’s interview where she discussed her background, expectations, and educational goals while at the EUI.