Handicap et sainteté au Moyen Âge

Disability and Sanctity in the Middle Ages
 

Stephanie Grace-Petinos, Leah Parker, Alicia Spencer-Hall (Editors)


Publisher ‏ : ‎ Amsterdam University Press (April 28, 2025)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 308 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9463724338
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-9463724333


This volume significantly expands current understandings of both disability and sanctity in the Middle Ages. Across the collection, heterogeneous constructions, and experiences, of disability and holiness are excavated. Analyses span the sixth to the fifteenth century, with discussion of holy men and holy women, Western Christian and Buddhist traditions, hagiographic texts, images, and artefacts. Each chapter underscores that disability and sanctity co-exist with a vast array of connotations, not just fully positive or fully negative, but also every inflection in between. The collection is a powerful rebuttal to the notion of the integral relationship of disability―medieval and otherwise―with sin, stigma, and shame. So doing, it recentres medieval disability history as a lived history that merits exploration and celebration. In this way, the volume serves to reclaim sanctity in disability histories as a means to affirm the possibility of radical disability futures.

L'alcool et l'imaginaire politique dans l'Australie coloniale

Drink and Democracy. Alcohol and the Political Imaginary in Colonial Australia
 

Matthew Allen

McGill-Queen’s University Press
2025

The nineteenth-century spread of democracy in Britain and its colonies coincided with an increase in alcohol consumption and in celebratory public dinners with rounds of toasts. British colonists raised their glasses to salute the Crown in rituals that asserted fraternal equality and political authority. Yet these ceremonies were reserved for gentlemen, leaving others – notably women and Indigenous people – on the political margins.

Drink and Democracy traces the development of democratic ideas in New South Wales through the history of public drinking and temperance. As the colony transformed from a convict autocracy to a liberal democracy, Matthew Allen argues, public drinking practices shaped the character of the emerging political order. The ritual of toasting was a symbolic display of restraint – drunkenness without loss of self-control – that embodied the claim to citizenship of white male settlers. Yet the performative sobriety of the temperance movement was also democratic, a display of respectability that politicized its supporters around a rival vision of responsible citizenship. Drink was a way to police the limits of the political realm. The stigma of female drunkenness worked to exclude women from the public sphere, while perceptions of heavy drinking among Aboriginal people cast them as lacking self-control and hence unworthy of political rights.

Drink and Democracy reveals that long before the introduction of the franchise, colonists in Australia imagined themselves as citizens. Yet even as democracy expanded, drink marked its limits.

 

Écologies du contrôle des maladies

Ecologies of Disease Control: Spaces of Health Security in Historical Perspective

Carolin Mezes, Sven Opitz, Andrea Wiegeshoff (Editors)


Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Pittsburgh Press (April 29, 2025)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 312 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0822948486
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0822948483


Ecologies of Disease Control explores the relationship between ecological conceptions of epidemics and forms of infectious disease control. Bringing historical, sociological, anthropological, and geographical case studies from the late eighteenth century to the present into dialogue, contributors unearth a multiplicity of spatial configurations in governing epidemics, putting contemporary health security regimes into historical perspective. Emerging infectious diseases—HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, influenza, SARS, West Nile virus, Marburg virus—and the threat they posed to national security and geopolitical order have incentivized the development of global health security initiatives since the 1990s. Yet, as this volume reveals, various practices of disease control have made epidemic outbreaks a matter of ecological management as well. These practices involve ecosystems and infrastructures, more-than-human mobilities, disease landscapes, elemental atmospheres, metabolic entanglements, and real-time information systems. As scholars in the humanities and social sciences begin to adopt ecology as an analytical framework, this volume offers a critical perspective on the ecological concepts that inform historical and current practices of health security.

Les pionniers de la microchirurgie

Les pionniers de la microchirurgie

Michel A. Germain

 

L'Harmattan

2025


La microchirurgie clinique a débuté avec deux hommes séparés par toute la largeur de l’océan Pacifique : Harry Buncke en Californie et Bernard O’Brien en Australie. Il existe cinq pays pionniers en microchirurgie : les États-Unis, l’Australie, le Japon, la Chine et la France.
Deux chirurgiens, Alexis Carrel en 1906, puis Jacobson en 1946, ont développé les microsutures vasculaires et les microtransplants. Depuis 1970, plusieurs équipes dans le monde se sont intéressées à la microchirurgie et ont contribué à son développement.
Aujourd’hui, toutes les spécialités médicales utilisent la microchirurgie. Elle est incontournable dans les cas difficiles ou insolubles. Voici son histoire, à travers celle de ces chirurgiens précurseurs.
Guérir les malades, les aider à se reconstruire d’une vie blessée par la maladie, ce livre se veut un message d’espoir.

Sciences et allégorie

“As stiffe twin compasses”: Allegory and Sciences, 1300-1700

Call for papers

Location: Warburg Institute, University of London

Conference date: 24 October 2025

Submission deadline: 15 June 2025

Organiser: Sergei Zotov (Frances Yates Fellow, Warburg Institute)

Keynote: Sachiko Kusukawa (Cambridge, Trinity College) on how emblematic worldview shaped early modern scientific thought and representation, from Vesalius and Brahe to Gessner, Camerarius Jr, and Boyle.

Zodiac Man as medical microcosm, Christ’s limbs symbolising chapters of the Bible, alchemical androgyne embodying sulphur and mercury, four demons representing cardinal winds, compass legs as lovers, the labyrinth as a path to divine truth — there are many examples illustrating how pre-modern sciences employed allegory to visualise and organise knowledge.

This conference investigates the multifaceted roles of allegory within scientific and intellectual traditions from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern period in Europe. Focusing on a wide range of disciplines — including anatomy, astrology, alchemy, botanics, magic, medicine, mathematics, zoology, and theology — we will examine how allegorical modes of representation functioned not only as a tool for conveying abstract ideas and encoding practical knowledge but also as a means of reinforcing the authority of a discipline.

Allegory helped shaping the conceptual frameworks through which knowledge was produced, transmitted, and legitimised in various sciences. By examining allegorical imagery and textual strategies, we will consider how scholars adapted this rhetorical or iconographical device to communicate across different audiences, from learned circles to broader publics. Through comparative analysis, we aim to uncover common patterns, disciplinary crossovers, and shifts in the use of allegory over time.

Special attention will be given to the interplay between text and image, the transmission of allegorical motifs, and the role of print and manuscript cultures in shaping allegorical traditions of sciences. Ultimately, the conference seeks to provide new insights into the intellectual history of allegory and its enduring impact on the representation of knowledge. By bringing together scholars from across fields and regions, we seek to advance a deeper understanding of allegory’s place in the intellectual history of premodern Europe.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: Epistemic Functions: How did allegory serve to encode and transmit scientific knowledge? What forms of reasoning did it support or obscure?
Cross-Disciplinary Currents: How was allegory used to mediate between different branches of knowledge — for instance, theology and natural philosophy, or magic and medicine?
Audiences and Authority: How did allegorical modes reinforce the authority of certain disciplines or figures? How were allegories tailored for elite, learned, or popular audiences?
Transmission and Variation: How did allegorical forms travel across manuscripts, printed books, and other media? What kinds of variation do we see in their visual or textual expression over time?


We encourage proposals from scholars working in history of science, intellectual history, art history, manuscript and book studies, and adjacent fields. PhD students and ECRs are also welcome to apply.

Please send proposals (max 300 words) and a short biographical note (max 150 words) to sergei.zotov@sas.ac.uk by 15 June 2025.

More information: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/CFP--allegory-and-sciences-1300-1700

La relation médecin-patient et le roman français du XIXe siècle

The Doctor-Patient Relationship and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel

Sarah Jones

 
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press (April 30, 2025)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0198893795
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0198893790 

The Doctor-Patient Relationship and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel analyses the representation of the doctor-patient relationship in the nineteenth-century French novel, notably in the words of Balzac, Sand, Stendhal, and Zola. It argues that the doctor-patient relationship is represented in these novels as a site of interpersonal negotiation wherein the meaning of medical authority, embodied experience, and the spectre of illness and pain are mediated and reimagined. This book highlights how the doctor-patient relationship is often idealized by the novel, wherein the doctor is characterised as a both dedicated to his patients and local community, as well as being a God-like master of life, death, and medical knowledge. The volume suggests that the doctor-patient encounter is often depicted as a separate, although inherently related, concept that undermines this idealisation of medical relationships. The doctor-patient encounter thereby questions the hegemonic power of medical practitioners over their patients by pointing towards how novels depict patients as resisting and even manipulating their doctors. The book identifies and explores other important themes within the doctor-patient relationship such as the medical gaze (regard médical), power relationships, and the use of embodied metaphor. In particular, the book highlights how the doctor-patient relationship is often a confrontation between scientific knowledge and the experience of gender and disability. The book's conceptual framework is derived from the critical medical humanities, and the volume revitalises and reframes the doctor-patient relationship by considering the intrinsic slippage between idealised relationships and critical encounters. The book uses close readings of its corpus to understand how medical practice is debated and undermined concurrently with its idealisation. It places literary works within a new historical context by reading across novels within their medical and scientific context, and situates them for the first time in the intellectual context of the critical medical humanities. The book points forward to how nineteenth-century French novels can reform how the critical medical humanities views the medical relationship, and the potential impact on real-world patients.

Les cartographes du cerveau

The Mind Mappers. Friendship, Betrayal and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain 

Eric Andrew-Gee

Penguin Random House
May 2025


In the early 1920s, when neurosurgery was more likely to be a death sentence than a cure, two men revolutionized the study of the brain: Wilder Penfield and William Cone. Drawn together by their shared fascination with the “undiscovered country” inside our heads, the surgeons formed a partnership and within ten years established the Montreal Neurological Institute in a Gothic stone hospital on the slope of a mountain. The Neuro soon became the world’s leading centre for neurological study, attracting men and women from across the globe to a booming mid-century city.

But their success came at the cost of their friendship.

While Cone spent long hours at patients’ bedsides and in the blood-spattered operating room, Penfield pursued the loftier goal of discovering the seat of consciousness. The Chief, as he was known, went on to develop the Montreal procedure for treating epilepsy, which helped identify the source of speech, executive function and memory in narrow slivers of grey matter—achievements that illuminated the relationship between mind and body, made possible by Cone’s anonymous work behind the scenes. Over time, their relationship became fraught with personal and professional hurts—and suddenly ended when Cone was found dead in his office at the age of sixty-two.

In this compelling dual biography, Globe and Mail journalist Eric Andrew-Gee weaves together the rich history of The Neuro with that of Penfield and Cone to reveal the untold story of one of the birthplaces of neuroscience. In doing so, he breathes new life into a familiar hero and revives the tragic, forgotten story of his partner, writing Dr. William Cone back into the historical record at last.

Groupe de travail international sur les modèles et moulages en cire médicale

International Working Group on Medical Wax Models & Moulages

Call for Papers



Meeting 9–10 September, 2025 at the Deutsches Medizinhistorisches Museum, Ingolstadt, Germany

Invitation and call for papers

Medical wax model collections have been the subject of renewed scientific interest since the turn of the millennium. As part of the material turn, scholars in history and cultural studies increasingly study historical objects in museums and university collections. Wax moulages in particular, with their specific characteristics, have attracted attention from medical professionals and historians alike.

A German-speaking Moulages Working Group was formed in Berlin in 2013, following a major international conference in Dresden 2009. Ten years later, at a meeting in Zurich in 2023, the circle of participants was expanded to represent collections from all over the world. As an international working group, we now take the next step and join the newly founded International Association of Medical Museums and Collections (IAMMC) as the International Working Group on Medical Wax Models (IWWM).

We invite you to join us to exchange ideas and network further in Ingolstadt before the start of the first biennial IAMMC meeting 10–13 September. Historical researchers, medical practitioners, as well as custodians, conservators, and curators are all welcome to join the meeting. We aim to address a wide range of questions and concerns relating to medical wax models. Papers may address topics such as

• historical knowledge production and mediation with wax models and moulages
• conservation and restoration practices
• ongoing research or exhibition projects
• using medical wax models in teaching, public outreach, or museum education work
• ethical aspects of displaying moulages and wax models in exhibitions and publications

Please submit paper proposals by 31 May to info@moulagen.ch

Practical information

• the abstract should be no longer than 1 DIN A4, including a short CV and details of your institution
• presentation formats – state which one you prefer: (1) a 20-minute paper, or (2) a 5-minute presentation of a collection, museum, exhibition, or network activities
• the conference language is English and the meeting can only be attended in person
• the meeting convenes 9 September 2 pm to 6 pm, and 10 September 9.30 am to 1 pm
• there will be a small conference fee to cover coffee and snacks
• IWWM web site (under construction): https://www.moulagen.uzh.ch/en/IWWM
• the IAMMC meeting 10-13 Sep.: https://www.dmm-ingolstadt.de/2025-iammc-conference.html

We look forward to seeing you in Ingolstadt!

The organizing committee: Michael Geiges, Sabina Carraro, Eloïse Quétel, Henrik Essler, Eva Åhrén

Contact Information

The organizing committee: Michael Geiges, Sabina Carraro, Eloïse Quétel, Henrik Essler, Eva Åhrén

IWWM web site (under construction): https://www.moulagen.uzh.ch/en/IWWM

Contact Email
info@moulagen.ch

URL
https://www.moulagen.uzh.ch/en/IWWM