Paper manager: Dániel Margócsy
Also offered in Part II of the Classical Tripos.
Lectures are held in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
All students should attend the core lectures in Michaelmas Term. In Lent, students should opt to follow either the Early Science track or the Early Medicine track. They will receive supervisions on only one of these tracks and they will be examined on material on either one of these tracks.
Michaelmas Term – Core Lectures | |
---|---|
Early Medicine Philippa Carter (1), Dániel Margócsy (1), Emma Spary (2) |
Fri 12noon (weeks 1–4) |
Visual and Material Culture Dániel Margócsy (2), Josh Nall (2) |
Tue 12noon (weeks 1–4) |
Revisiting the Scientific Revolution Staffan Müller-Wille (4) Week 8 (24 Nov): lecture cancelled |
Thu 12noon (weeks 5–8) |
Traditions of Knowledge and Healing Philippa Carter (4) |
Tue 12noon (weeks 5–8) |
Lent Term – Early Science Track | |
---|---|
Early Modern Natural Knowledge Dániel Margócsy (4) |
Mon 2pm (weeks 1–4) |
Institutions of Natural Knowledge Production Dániel Margócsy (4) |
Wed 11am (weeks 1–4) |
Indian and Chinese Science Mary Brazelton (2), Charu Singh (2) |
Mon 2pm (weeks 5–8) |
Natural Knowledge in the Enlightenment Staffan Müller-Wille (4) |
Wed 11am (weeks 5–8) |
Lent Term – Early Medicine Track | |
---|---|
Topics in the Social History of Medicine Philippa Carter (3), Emma Spary (1) |
Fri 12noon (weeks 1–4) |
Global Natures in the Age of Exploration Dániel Margócsy (4) |
Tue 12noon (weeks 1–4) |
Islamic and Chinese Medicine Mary Brazelton (2), Dror Weil (2) |
Fri 12noon (weeks 5–8) |
Early Modern and Enlightenment Medicine and Natural History Emma Spary (4) |
Tue 12noon (weeks 5–8) |
Why did people learn about human sexuality well into the 19th century from a book titled Aristotle's Masterpiece? How are Newtonian physics and slavery connected? Do we need pictures to learn what the human body looks like? What did Ottomans think of the idea of a heliocentric universe? 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 Paper 1 asks.
Paper 1 considers scientific and medical knowledge in the ancient, medieval and early modern periods, including the Enlightenment, and covers a wide geographical space, focusing on a number of different societies. We examine how natural philosophers, healing women, artisans and men and women from a variety of backgrounds thought about the cosmos, 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 knowledge production.
We examine continuities and discontinuities in the history of science and medicine to 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 European science and medicine throughout our period, and why Stephen Hawking still referred to Aristotle in his last book. We critically examine what it means to study early science and medicine from a global perspective, with examples ranging from early Ming China through 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 scientific, medical and mathematical ideas and practices of the ancient, medieval and early modern periods including:
- astronomy and astrology
- cosmology and physics
- mathematical sciences
- medicine and pharmaceutics
- vernacular modes of knowledge production
- natural philosophy and natural history;
- to acquaint students with some of the fundamental themes in the interpretation of pre-modern science and medicine, including a consideration of:
- sites and institutions of learning
- the social and geographical constraints of knowledge production
- literacy, material culture and communicating knowledge
- the transmission of knowledge across cultures
- interactions between customers, patients and producers in medical and scientific marketplaces
- classifications of scientific and 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.
Core lectures
Early Medicine
Philippa Carter, Dániel Margócsy, 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 and Material Culture
Dániel Margócsy, Josh Nall (4 lectures, Michaelmas Term)
This is a set of four lectures that focus on visual and material sources that shed light on the ideas and ideals of medical knowledge, expertise and authority in early modern Europe. Traditionally, this is the period lauded for the growing empiricism, direct observation and accuracy, but the sources tell a more nuanced and complex story about medical practices within a wider context.
Revisiting the Scientific Revolution
Staffan Müller-Wille (4 lectures, Michaelmas Term)
The discipline of history and philosophy of science has long been dominated by the idea that 17th-century Europe saw profound changes in the practice of natural philosophy and the world views it produced, 'giving birth' to modern science. The idea that there was a 'Scientific Revolution' gains its significance not only from the fact that it demarcates historical epochs. It has also generated distinctions of mentalities, cultural practices and forms of governance that separate the modern from the premodern, 'the West' from 'the Rest', in the present. This lecture series introduces key texts that contributed to the construction – and deconstruction – of the idea of a Scientific Revolution, with the aim of gaining a critical understanding of the terms of the debates that continue to surround the concept to date. In particular we will try to understand the tension that exists between beliefs that modern science is a hegemonic mode of knowing, intimately associated with imperial expansion, and the idea that it crucially depended on contributions from subalterns around the world.
- Theory and practice: externalist and internalist readings of the scientific revolution
- Anthropology and the history of science
- Media revolutions and the circulation of knowledge
- The knowledge-power equation
Traditions of Knowledge and Healing
Philippa Carter (4 lectures, Michaelmas Term)
Early Science track
Early Modern Natural Knowledge
Dániel Margócsy (4 lectures, Lent Term)
These lectures examine the fortunes of natural knowledge and its practitioners in early modern Europe by discussing shifts in institutions, modes of explanation, methods of observation and experiments, and identities of practitioners and disciplines, through selected case studies. Lectures address themes in the history of natural philosophy and new models of producing natural knowledge: the cases discussed include the work of Galileo, Boyle, Newton and their contemporaries, alongside the emergence of larger and more complex networks of knowledge that linked reorganised laboratories, colleges and observatories with different kinds of artisans and labourers, including enterprises in chemistry, natural history and the mathematical sciences.
- The heavens and the earth: astronomy and natural philosophy
- The parts of the world: experiment and travel
- Chemistry and the laboratory
- Newton and natural philosophy
Institutions of Natural Knowledge Production
Dániel Margócsy (4 lectures, Lent Term)
Where does one do science and technology? In the garage? These four lectures examine four prominent locations for the production of natural knowledge in Europe and across the globe. We study how professional and domestic spaces shaped the development of philosophical ideas and how global political ambitions were crucial for the development of a variety of disciplines. The emphasis is on the nature of social interactions different spatial structures enable and constrain.
- The court and the academy
- The household
- The navy
- The colonial administration
Indian and Chinese Science
Mary Brazelton, Charu Singh (4 lectures, Lent Term)
Natural Knowledge in the Enlightenment
Staffan Müller-Wille (4 lectures, Lent Term)
These lectures and classes discuss themes in the development of natural knowledge and its aims in the long 18th century. Lectures treat in detail the instrumentation and material culture of the sciences, techniques of experimentation, travel and communication, methods and techniques of the sciences, forms of knowledge in print, the topics of globalization and industrialization, and the principal intellectual and programmatic trends in the new sciences of the European enlightenment.
- What was the Enlightenment?
- Newtonianism
- Linnaean natural history
- The ends of the Enlightenment
Early Medicine track
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.
Global Natures in the Age of Exploration
Dániel Margócsy (4 lectures, Lent Term)
These lectures examine the construction of nature in early modern global encounters. We study how ideas about health, the human body and nature emerged during the (often forced) encounters of different traditions of knowledge-making across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean world. We discuss different models of encounter, medical and scientific studies of race, the emergence of colonial medicine and the role of commerce and empire.
- Medical traditions in the Atlantic
- Human bodies and race
- Worms and disease
- Trade and trust in natural history
Islamic and Chinese Medicine
Mary Brazelton, Dror Weil (4 lectures, Lent Term)
These lectures offer an overview of medicine in the early Chinese and Islamic worlds. We will consider basic concepts of the body and disease, how efforts to treat and prevent illness arose within such a framework, and how these practices were transformed by new texts, professions and institutions over time. Central themes and case studies will emphasise the ways in which medicine in Chinese and Islamic contexts was characterised by a diversity of practices and pedagogies. We will also consider how medical practitioners in many contexts incorporated ideas, materials and texts from foreign sources.
- China: theories and sources (MB)
- Islam: sources (DW)
- Exchanges (DW)
- Institutions (MB)
Early Modern and Enlightenment Medicine and Natural History
Emma Spary (4 lectures, Lent Term)
These lectures and classes continue the topics introduced in the Early 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.
Preliminary reading
- The Penguin Atlas of World History, Volume 1: From Prehistory to the Eve of the French Revolution (London: Penguin, 2003)
- Bleichmar, Daniela, Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017)
- Clark, William, Jan Golinski and Simon Schaffer (eds), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
- Cohen, I. Bernard, Album of Science: From Leonardo to Lavoisier, 1450–1800 (New York: Scribner, 1980)
- Cuomo, Serafina, Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
- Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007)
- Dear, Peter, Revolutionizing the Sciences (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001)
- Duden, Barbara, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in 18th-Century Germany, translated by Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)
- Eco, Umberto, The Name of the Rose (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983)
- Elmer, Peter (ed.), The Healing Arts: Health, Disease and Society in Europe, 1500–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004)
- Fara, Patricia, An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Icon, 2002)
- Farquhar, Judith, A Way of Life: Things, Thought and Action in Chinese Medicine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020)
- Fissell, Mary, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
- Frasca-Spada, Marina, and Nick Jardine (eds), Books and the Sciences in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Part I
- French, Roger, Medicine Before Science: The Rational and Learned Doctor from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
- Galilei, Galileo, Sidereus Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger, translated by Albert van Helden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)
- Gómez, Pablo, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)
- Gutas, Dimitri, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London: Routledge, 1998)
- Hankins, Thomas, and Robert Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
- Hankins, Thomas, Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
- Henry, John, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997)
- Jardine, Lisa, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution (London: Little, Brown, 1999)
- Jardine, Nick, Jim Secord and Emma Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
- Kieckhefer, Richard, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989/2000)
- Lindberg, David C., and Michael H. Shank, The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 2: Medieval Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
- Lloyd, Geoffrey, Early Greek Science (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970)
- Lloyd, Geoffrey, Greek Science after Aristotle (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973)
- MacDonald, Michael, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in 17th-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
- Murdoch, John E., Album of Science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York: Scribner, 1984)
- Park, Katharine, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006)
- Pedersen, Olaf, Early Physics and Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
- Pelling, Margaret, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1998)
- Pomata, Gianna, Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers and the Law in Early Modern Bologna (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)
- Porter, Roy, The Scientific Revolution in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
- Porter, Roy, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (London: HarperCollins, 1997)
- Raj, Kapil, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
- Rossi, Paolo, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era (New York: Harper & Row, 1970)
- Schiebinger, Londa, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants and Medicine in the 18th-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017)
- Shapin, Steven, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
- Siraisi, Nancy, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)
- Small, Jocelyn Penny, Wax Tablets of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1997)
- Taub, Liba, Aetna and the Moon: Explaining Nature in Ancient Greece and Rome (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2008)
- Tomalin, Claire, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (London: Viking, 2002)
- Webster, Charles, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
- Westman, Robert, and David Lindberg, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)