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

Paper manager: Dániel Margócsy

Overview

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

Michaelmas Term

  • Early Medicine: An Introduction
    Lauren Kassell (4)
    Fri 12noon (weeks 1–4)
  • Early Modern Natural Knowledge
    Dániel Margócsy (4)
    Tue 12noon (weeks 5–8)

Lent Term

  • Topics in the Social History of Medicine
    Lauren Kassell (6), Beatrice Bottomley (2)
    Fri 12noon (weeks 1–8)
  • Institutions of Natural Knowledge Production 
    Dániel Margócsy (2), Maria Floruțău (2)
    Tue 12noon (weeks 1–4)
  • Indian Ocean Natures
    Dániel Margócsy (2), Beatrice Bottomley (2)
    Tue 12noon (weeks 5–8)

Introduction

Why did people learn about human sexuality well into the 19th century from a book titled Aristotle's Masterpiece? And how did Islamicate societies engage in very similar discussions in the Middle Ages? How are Newtonian physics and enslavement connected? Do we need pictures to learn what the human body looks like? What is Enlightenment? 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 in the medieval, early modern and Enlightenment periods. It covers a wide geographical space, focusing on a number of different societies and cultures. We examine how natural philosophers, clerics, healing women, artisans 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 focus on the institutions, practices and networks of healing and knowledge production.

Continuities and discontinuities in the history of medicine help us learn how people over two millennia hoped to understand and transform the human and natural world. We discuss how ancient knowledge remained a major source for medicine throughout our period in Europe and in the Islamicate world. We critically examine what it means to study early medicine from a global perspective, and especially in Asia. 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

Lauren Kassell (4 lectures, Michaelmas Term)

These lectures introduce the history of European medicine before 1800. They centre, first, on the notion of the rational doctor. These were physicians educated in the newly-founded universities who laid claim to authority over other sorts of medical practitioners, often denigrating their practices as superstitious. Secondly, we will discuss the idea of the medical marketplace, as a description of the rise of commercial medicine and, analytically, signalling the power of the patient to choose her own medical care and prompting a discussion of diverse models for understanding the organisation of medical provision in the past. Thirdly, we will put the patient at the centre of the history of medicine to consider shared and competing understandings of health and illness in premodern societies. Throughout these lectures, we will attend to shifting approaches to textual knowledge, much of it inherited from ancient Greek and Roman and later Islamicate authors, and the sorts of evidence – the many kinds of texts and the rich array of visual and material remains – that can be used for understanding the history of early medicine.

Early Modern Natural Knowledge

Dániel Margócsy (4 lectures, Michaelmas Term)

These lectures introduce some key themes in early modern European understandings of the natural world. We will explore not only what was known, but how and by whom. By considering the theories, practices, institutions and people involved in the production of natural knowledge, we convey the complex and multifaceted nature of science and medicine that belies any notion of straightforward progress in the period. The focus is on the developing relationship between natural philosophy and vernacular types of knowledge, and the complex, but by no means simultaneous, development of medicine and other types of knowledge.

Topics in the Social History of Medicine

Lauren Kassell, Beatrice Bottomley (8 lectures, Lent Term)

These lectures continue the themes outlined in the lectures on Early Medicine: An Introduction. We will discuss changes and continues in health and medicine, centred on the period c.1000 to 1800, when the world became more connected, urban centres went through a series of expansions and contractions, political and religious institutions took on new forms, modes of communication were transformed, and the pursuit of natural knowledge expanded to include people with diverse skills and experiences. Topics will include the histories of disease, conceptions of health and longevity, generation and reproduction, and cures and therapeutics. We will draw particularly on examples from the European and Islamicate worlds.

Institutions of Natural Knowledge Production

Dániel Margócsy, Maria Floruțău (4 lectures, Lent Term)

The court, the laboratory, the scientific society, and the colonial world. This lecture series focuses on the sites and institutions of knowledge production in the early modern period and the Enlightenment. We query how alternative organisations of knowledge production produced different outcomes, and we provide a thorough overview of the relationship between science and the state.

Indian Ocean Natures

Dániel Margócsy, Beatrice Bottomley (4 lectures, Lent Term)

These lectures consider European and Asian concepts of nature and the cosmos, with a focus on the broader Indian Ocean world. We will explore the ways in which the exchange of knowledge, people, and products changed understandings of the natural world. We examine how religious, commercial and imperial incentives intersected with philosophical and scientific ideas, and how these ideas travelled between the widely different knowledge traditions of the region.

Preliminary reading