Tag: Medicine

Medicine and the Making of Race, 1440-1720

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https://www.mmor.co.uk/

Medicine and the Making of Race, 1440-1720 is a four-year UKRI FLF-funded project which seeks to explore the role of medical practitioners in the early years of the slave trade, and the relationship their practical experiences had to early modern ideas of ‘race’.

This project aims to uncover and analyze practical medical attitudes to enslaved and free Black Africans in early modern Europe, and in early modern Europeans’ global encounters. It addresses several key research questions:

  • How did medical practitioners contribute to the earliest global encounters?
  • What role did they play in the increasingly systematic enslavement of African peoples, both in Europe and in the New World?
  • Did African communities provide alternative medical treatments, and if so, how did European medicine encounter and react to these practices?
  • How did medical treatment of “foreign bodies” inform practitioners’ attitudes to human difference? How did medical conceptions of difference inform developing ideas “race”?

History of Medicine Research Guide

https://www.hsls.pitt.edu/history-of-medicine

From the Health Sciences Library System at the University of Pittsburgh. Includes Medical Humanities Dissertations: a monthly listing of recent doctoral dissertations worldwide covering aspects of the medical humanities including the history of medicine and science. Full text access to materials requires subscription through other databases.

Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640

Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640

A production of the Making and Knowing Project, this edition provides a transcription and English translation of Ms. Fr. 640, composed by an anonymous “author-practitioner” in 1580s Toulouse and now held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. This manuscript offers unique firsthand insight into making and materials from a time when artists were scientists. The research resources in this edition explore the manuscript’s context and diverse topics.

Database of Early Modern German Physicians’ Letters

Database of Early Modern German Physicians’ Letters

Started in 2009, the database now offers free online access to the records of about 45,000 letters written by or to learned physicians in the German lands between 1500 and 1700. These letters contain a wealth of information not only about medical and natural philosophical issues but also on family matters, political and confessional conflicts, on cities and courts and many other topics. In addition to the basic data (names, date, places), thousands of datasets contain a detailed summary of the letter in question. Recently, an English-language user surface has been added and over the next years English translations of the German summaries will be added.