Research Project

The Signatures of Plants in Early Modern Science and Medicine

Wellcome Trust Doctoral Studentship 221115

This thesis analyses the signature of plants, often referred to as the ‘doctrine of signatures’, as a technique in early modern science and medicine. In early modern Europe, natural philosophers conceptualised God’s ‘signatures’ imprinted on natural things that indicated their medical uses. These signatures were often plants’ visual resemblance to certain bodily components, disease symptoms, or chymical substances. Unravelling modern colonial, anthropological and structuralist theories layered onto the doctrine of signatures, this thesis reexamines this burdened concept through the lens of artisanal knowledge. It approaches the signature of plants as a set of heuristic and operative procedures fluidly navigating different early modern cosmologies and ontologies. Centring late 17th-century England, a locale traditionally associated with the ‘decline’ of the doctrine of signatures, it shows that the signatures of plants were widely applied as a useful technique by various people, from eminent experimental philosophers to anonymous practitioners. They used the signatures to discover and understand medical herbs in school education, local plant surveys, medicinal information management, and the early Royal Society’s quests into the corpuscular rationale of plants’ healing properties. Digging into the specificities of herbs and remedies, it recontextualises the often flattened and doctrinalised plant-body visual analogies in medical and natural philosophical practices. Focusing on dynamic processes of mystification and demystification, it demonstrates that the signature of plants was constructed as a mystical, occult and superstitious method in certain debates, while being an easy, novel and experimental one in others. In doing so, this thesis breaks away from the usual magic-science dichotomic narrative attributed to the doctrine of signatures. Instead, it emphasises these signatures’ distinctive lifespan and temporality as enduring techniques.

Publications

Journal Articles

"When Jupiter Meets Saturn: Aby Warburg, Karl Sudhoff, and Astrological Medicine in the Age of Disenchantment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 85, no. 2 (2024): 321-355. doi:10.1353/jhi.2024.a926151. Open Access version: https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC7615932.

“Colouring Flowers: Books, Art, and Experiment in the Household of Margery and Henry Power,” co-authored with Christoffer Basse Eriksen, British Journal for the History of Science 56, no. 1 (2023): 21–43. doi:10.1017/S0007087422000474.

• Awarded the 2024 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize by the History of Science Society (HSS), for the best article in the field published in the four previous years.
• Awarded the 2023 Best Article Award by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender (SSEMWG), for the best article in the field published in the past year.
• Featured in the Sloane Lab's digital exhibition, 'In the Margins of Early Modern Science: Pioneering Women in Sloane’s ‘Paper Museum’. 

Book Chapters

“Microscopy and the Signatures of Plants in Early Royal Society of London”, in Images and Institutions: The Visual Culture of Early Modern Scientific Societies, ed. Katherine Reinhart & Matthijs Jonker, Brepols (accepted, forthcoming March 2025). 

Magazine Essays and Blog Posts

“The Line of Transmission: Tracing botanical images in Frank Nicholls’s manuscript (MS/ 24) at the Linnean Society,” The Linnean, vol.39.2, September 2023, 46-49. 

“The Fair Never Ends: On Collecting European Rare Books and Other Things,” Art Monthly (China), February 2023, 27-33. 

"The Abyss of Recipes: Cassell’s Cyclopaedia of Mechanics and William Kentridge’s Second-Hand Reading," Doing History in Public, June 2021.

Exhibitions

"From Magic to Microscopes: The Doctrine of Signatures in Early Modern Science and Medicine," Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Cambridge, and Tsinghua University Science Museum, Beijing, 31 Mar-19 Apr 2022 (in person) and 1 July 2022-present (online).

Section Curator, "The Quest for "Perfect Truth": Embodiment, Objectivity, and Cornelius Varley’s Graphic Telescope," in “Three Research Journeys,” Whipple Library, Cambridge, Nov 2020-Mar 2021

Invited Lectures

"Bilderfahrzeuge to China: Aby Warburg’s Encounter with Chinese Astrology," Max Planck Institute of History of Science, Dept. III, Research Group "Visualization of the Heavens," 21 June 2023; Warburg Institute, 29 March 2023.

"Extra-Illustrating Natural History in Early Modern England," Cambridge HPS, Cabinet of Natural History, 27 February 2023.

“The Doctrine of Signatures in Early Modern Medicine,” British Society for the History of Pharmacy, 25 April 2022. Available on YouTube. 

“The Doctrine of Signatures: A Curious History,” Cambridge Festival, 5 April 2022.

"Inventing the Doctrine of Signatures in Nineteenth-Century British Colonial Pharmacy," University of Manchester, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, 14 December 2021.

"The Lesser Herbals in Early Modern Natural History," Cambridge HPS, Cabinet of Natural History, 11 October 2021.

Affiliations

Predoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute of History of Science, Dept III, Research Group “Agriculture and the Making of Sciences,” Berlin, Apr-Jul 2023.

Visiting Student, Warburg Institute, London, Jan-Mar 2023.

Visiting Student, Department of History and Civilisation, European University Institute, Florence, Feb-Mar 2022.

Professional Memberships

Fellow of The Linnean Society of London

Postgraduate Member of the Royal Historical Society