Early Medicine

Minor Subject 113 in Part II Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS)
Paper 13_1 in the BBS Major Subject History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine
Specified Subject 11 in Part II of the History Tripos

Part II students' guide: BBS options

Paper manager: Philippa Carter

Lectures are held in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

Why did people learn about human sexuality well into the 19th century from a book titled Aristotle's Masterpiece? What are the connections between medicine and enslavement? Do we need pictures to learn what the human body looks like? What as the reception of Galen in India? What is Enlightenment? How traditional is Chinese Traditional Medicine? And how should we write a medical history of worms? These are some of the questions that this paper asks.

The Early Medicine paper considers medical knowledge and healing practices before 1800, and it covers a wide geographical space, focusing on a number of different societies. We examine how physicians, healing women, midwives and men and women from a variety of backgrounds thought about life and death, the natural world and the human body. We study what methods, media and instruments they used to study these phenomena. We also examine the institutions, practices and networks of healing and knowledge production.

We examine continuities and discontinuities in the history of medicine to learn how people over two millennia hoped to understand and transform the human and natural world. We critically examine what it means to study early medicine from a global perspective, with examples ranging from Mughal India to colonial Latin America. Last, but not least, we pay special attention to the question of how historical knowledge is produced. How do historians evaluate archival and printed sources, and how can one write a history of material objects, such as 18th-century obstetric models or exotic snakes bottled in a jar?

Aims and learning outcomes

• to encourage students to explore the medical ideas and practices of the ancient, medieval and early modern periods including:
  • medicine and pharmaceutics
  • healing, the preservation of health, and the processes of dying
  • vernacular modes of knowledge production
  • concepts of the body
  • sexual and racial diversity;
• to acquaint students with some of the fundamental themes in the interpretation of pre-modern medicine, including a consideration of:
  • sites and institutions of learning
  • the social and geographical constraints of healing and knowledge production
  • literacy, material culture, and communicating knowledge
  • the transmission of practices and knowledges across cultures
  • interactions between customers, patients, and producers in medical and scientific marketplaces
  • classifications of medical knowledge
  • evidence, interpretation and historiography;
• to encourage students to engage critically with evidence, textual, visual and material;
• to encourage students to explore the continuity and changes of scientific and medical institutions, methods, and ideas across cultures and time periods.

Lectures

Early Medicine: An Introduction

Philippa Carter, Emma Spary (4 lectures, Michaelmas Term)

These lectures provide an overview of European medicine before 1800. We will examine ways in which medical encounters and healing took place in a variety of sites. We will also examine how Greek and Arab medicine, anatomy and natural philosophy were foundational to learned medical theory and practices, and how these ancient and medieval views came under attack. The lectures address the political, social and spatial structuring of medical provision to address the political structures underlying healthcare in the period. We will study how different practitioners were trained and how they interacted both with each other and their patients.

Visual Culture of Science and Medicine

Sachiko Kusukawa (4 lectures, Michaelmas Term)

Science today is supremely visual – in its experiments, observations and communication, images have become integral to the scientific enterprise. These four lectures examine the role of images in anatomy, natural history and astronomy between the 15th and the 18th centuries. Rather than assessing images against a yardstick of increasing empiricism or an onward march towards accurate observation, these lectures draw attention to the myriad, ingenious ways in which images were deployed to create scientific objects, aid scientific arguments and simulate instrumental observations. Naturalistic styles of depictions are often mistaken for evidence of first-hand observation, but in this period, they were deployed as a visual rhetoric of persuasion rather than proof of an observed object. By examining the production and uses of imagery in this period, these lectures will offer ways to understand more generally what was entailed in scientific visualisation in early modern Europe.

European Traditions of Medical Knowledge

Philippa Carter (4 lectures, Lent term)

These lectures explore some of the key systems of thought and belief which underpinned the practice of medicine in Europe and its colonies before c. 1800. We will focus on the models which helped early modern Europeans to manage and make sense of their bodies, their environments, and their experiences of illness. Each lecture offers an introduction to one or more explanatory frameworks: humoralism, theories of disease transmission, astrology, and belief in spirits. Traversing the centuries between c. 1400 and 1800, we will consider how, when and why these traditions of knowledge and healing overlapped, competed, diverged and (in some cases) died out.

South Asian Traditions of Medical Knowledge

Sonia Wigh (4 lectures, Lent Term)

How was medicine conceptualised in the early modern South Asian world, and who counted as its practitioners? These lectures investigate how people across South Asia and its connected geographies crafted medical knowledge, the forms that such knowledge took, and the ways in which this knowledge travelled and transformed over time and space. We will consider how differing humoral medical paradigms and cosmological frameworks co-existed, clashed, and fostered the translation, circulation, and co-constitution of medical knowledge in South Asia before 1800. Lectures will also touch upon conceptions of the body, disease etiology, prescriptions and cures, and institutions of medical knowledge production in early modern South Asia.

Early Modern and Enlightenment Medicine and Natural History

Emma Spary (4 lectures, Lent Term)

These lectures continue the topics introduced in the European Medicine lectures and focus on changes in understanding in the period between 1500 and 1800. During this period important discoveries were made in pharmacies, in alchemical laboratories, in the New World and under microscopes, and we consider the influence of these discoveries on medical theory and practice. In addition to drawing upon learned and vernacular medical, religious and literary texts, we will also consider how medicine became transformed in the course of the long 18th century.

Topics in the Social History of Medicine

Philippa Carter, Emma Spary (4 lectures, Lent Term)

These lectures examine how to write a social history of medicine that includes both learned and vernacular traditions and professional and domestic settings. It examines how medicine was practised in early modern households, with a special focus on issues of gender and sexual reproduction. We also reflect on the practices of historical research. We critically evaluate what biases printed, archival, visual and material sources of evidence bring to the study of the past, and what interpretive techniques need to be applied to the study of such sources. We discuss how different sources are available for the study of elite, learned, vernacular and/or medical practices in the period.

Preliminary reading

• Alavi, Seema, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–1900, pp. 18–53 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
• Kusukawa, Sachiko, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014)
• Kusukawa, Sachiko, Andreas Vesalius: Anatomy and the World of Books (London: Reaktion, 2024)
• Park, Katharine, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006)
• Siraisi, Nancy, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)
• Wear, Andrew, 'Medicine in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700', in Lawrence Conrad et al. (eds), The Western Medical Tradition: 800 BC to AD 1800, pp. 215–361 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
• Wujastyk, Dominik, The Roots of Ayurveda: Selections from Sanskrit Medical Writings, pp. 1–36 (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998)

Resources for Early Medicine on Moodle