Part II Paper 1: Early Science and Medicine

Paper manager: Philippa Carter

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.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: The following lectures have been rescheduled to the new dates below. They will still take place at 12 noon in Seminar Room 2.

Tuesday 17 Feb: Transforming Medical Worlds 1, Emma Spary

Friday 20 Feb: South Asian Traditions 4, Sonia Wigh 

Friday 27 Feb: Social History of Medicine 2, Philippa Carter 

Tuesday 3 March: Transforming Medical Worlds 2, Emma Spary 

Why did people learn about human sexuality well into the 19th century from a book titled Aristotle's Masterpiece? How are Newtonian physics and enslavement 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? 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 early modern period, including the Enlightenment, and covers a wide geographical space, focusing on a number of different societies and cultures. 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. We critically examine what it means to study early science and 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 scientific, medical and mathematical ideas and practices of the ancient, medieval and early modern periods including:
  • astronomy, astrology and physics
  • mathematical sciences
  • medicine, pharmaceutics and alchemy
  • 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 through various textual and visual media
  • the transmission of knowledge between regions, peoples and 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: 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.

Early Modern Natural Knowledge

Emma Perkins (4 lectures, Michaelmas Term)

These lectures introduce some key themes in early modern 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 that belies any notion of straightforward progress in the period.

Natural Knowledge in the Enlightenment

Staffan Müller-Wille (4 lectures, Michaelmas 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 globalisation and industrialisation, and the principal intellectual and programmatic trends in the new sciences of the European enlightenment. The lectures will pay particular attention to the sites and spaces of knowledge production and discuss the role of emerging sciences in the formulation of key enlightenment ideas about progress, human exceptionalism and human diversity.

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.

Early Science track

Institutions of Natural Knowledge Production

Emma Perkins (4 lectures, Lent Term)

These lectures introduce some of the different sites in which natural knowledge was produced in the early modern period. We consider how the institutions of knowledge production shaped science in multiple ways: through its practice, participation, reception, and ultimately the type of knowledge that was produced.

Scientific Travellers

Staffan Müller-Wille (4 lectures, Lent Term)

'Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased' (Daniel 12:4). Natural philosophers and natural historians in the early modern period liked to quote this sentence from the Bible. And many historians of science, too, have understood the period as an age of intense exploration and globalisation, in which peoples, ideas and objects crossed seas and steppes and traversed the boundaries of diverse cultural and environmental contexts. These new pathways of circulation and exchange went hand-in-hand with the rapid proliferation and growth of empires, new trade networks and religious missions. The co-production of knowledge through encounters between Europeans and Others therefore often built on asymmetric power relations and took the form of exploitation or extraction. For some time now, historians of science have understood such structures, inequalities and processes to have played an indispensable role in the emergence of the 'new' sciences in the early modern period. This lecture series explores how travellers – whether voluntarily on the move or not – and the geographies of knowledge they were embedded in shaped early modern conceptions of both the natural and human worlds.

Global Natures

Emma Perkins (4 lectures, Lent Term)

These lectures consider concepts of nature in a global context. We will explore the ways in which the exchange of knowledge, people and products changed scientific and social understandings. We examine how commercial and imperial incentives intersected with scientific ideas, and how these ideas changed in response to interaction between European and non-European knowledge traditions.

Instruments and Material Culture

Joshua Nall (4 lectures, Lent Term)

These lectures are intended to introduce you not to ideas but to things. They will take place in the Whipple Museum, so that we can look at and handle a range of instruments made and used between the 16th and 18th centuries. We will consider their design and the craft skills essential for their making; and we will ponder the relationship between that craft skill and the pursuit of both practical and scholarly activities in this period.

Early Medicine track

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)
• Dear, Peter, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009)
• Harkness, Deborah, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007)
• 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)
• Raj, Kapil, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
• 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 Paper 1 on Moodle