La prochaine séance de la Société Française d’Histoire de la Médecine

La prochaine séance de la Société Française d’Histoire de la Médecine 

Vendredi 24 JANVIER 2025 à 14 heures
à l’Académie Nationale de Médecine, 16 rue Bonaparte 75006 Paris. Salle du 3e étage.

Informations générales, présentation et élection des candidats.
 

Conférence invitée (60 min)
Jacqueline VONS
Élise ANDRÉ
Sur les pas d’Alfred-Armand Velpeau (1795-1867)
 

Communications (20 min)
Hélène LEUWERS
S’engager à guérir par contrat (Paris, 1483-1567)
 

Hélène PERDICOYANNI-PALÉOLOGOU
La fièvre dans le Corpus Hippocraticum
 

Les résumés de ces communications sont disponibles sur notre site internet : https://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/sfhm/1523-2/

 

 

Bourses de la Linda Hall Library

Linda Hall Library 2025-26 fellowship program

Call for applications



The Linda Hall Library is now accepting applications for our 2025-26 fellowship program. These fellowships provide graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and independent scholars in the history of science and related humanities fields with financial support to explore the Library’s outstanding science and engineering collections. Fellows also participate in a dynamic intellectual community alongside in-house experts and scholars from other Kansas City cultural and educational institutions.

The Linda Hall Library holds nearly half a million monographs and more than 43,000 journal titles documenting the history of science and technology from the 15th century to the present. Its collections are exceptionally strong in the engineering disciplines, chemistry, and physics. In addition, the Library boasts extensive resources related to natural history, astronomy, earth science, environmental studies, aeronautics, life science, infrastructure studies, mathematics, and the history of the book.

The Library offers residential fellowships to support on-site research in Kansas City, as well as virtual fellowships for scholars working remotely using resources from the Library’s digital collections. Applicants may request up to four months of funding at a rate of $3,000 per month for doctoral students and $4,200 per month for postdoctoral researchers.

The Library is also offering several fellowships intended for specific groups of researchers: The National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship provides nine months of residential funding ($5,000 per month) to a postdoctoral scholar whose research explores the intersection of science and the humanities.
The History of Science and Medicine Fellowship, offered in partnership with the Clendening History of Medicine Library at the University of Kansas Medical Center, provides one month of residential funding ($3,000 per month) to a doctoral student whose research examines the intersecting histories of science and medicine.
The Pearson Fellowship in Aerospace History provides up to two months of residential funding ($4,200 per month) to a postdoctoral scholar studying the history of aviation or spaceflight.
The Presidential Fellowship in Bibliography provides up to four months of residential funding ($4,200 per month) to a postdoctoral scholar whose research focuses on the study of books and manuscripts as physical artifacts.


Further details about the Linda Hall Library’s 2025-26 fellowships can be found on our website: https://lindahall.org/fellowships. While you are there, you can submit an application or sign up for our online information sessions on December 17, 2024 and January 3, 2025.



You are also welcome to email questions directly to fellowships@lindahall.org. Please note that all application materials, including recommendation letters, are due no later than January 17, 2025.



Please share this announcement with graduate students, colleagues, or anyone else who might be benefit from the Linda Hall Library’s collections.

Classification psychologique et diagnostic dans les statistiques d'asiles

Psychological Classification and Diagnosis in Asylum Statistics, 1800 - 1948: The British Table of the Forms of Insanity 

Kevin Matthew Jones

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Palgrave Macmillan; 2024th edition (11 Jan. 2025)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 375 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-3031461538


This book provides a detailed examination of the questions that preoccupied British alienists throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Was insanity one disorder with different forms or a set of distinct natural kinds that each had different causes, symptoms, and outlooks? Was it possible to devise a standardised classification of the insanities that provides a scientific basis to psychological diagnosis? Could statistics on psychological diagnosis provide data to help reveal the nature of insanity?

The classification at the centre of these debates, the Medico-Psychological Association’s Table of the Forms of Insanity, caused deep divisions that took decades to resolve and hampered efforts to develop asylum medical statistics on psychological diagnosis. The use of the classification in national medical statistics was tantamount to being the standard classification for the asylum. As the appeal of statistics grew within medical circles, the debates intensified, and the divisions grew deeper. Despite lofty aims and years of debate, attempts to develop national statistics on psychological diagnosis had achieved very little by the beginning of the twentieth century. The failure of these efforts, hampered by the unwieldy processes adopted by Lunacy administration, led to the Table of the Forms falling into obscurity after its final set of revisions in 1932.

In presenting for the first time the debates surrounding the Table of the Forms of Insanity, this volume calls for a re-evaluation of the history of psychiatric classification through its exploration of the underappreciated links between the standardisation of psychological diagnosis and the development of mental health statistics. By interrogating the links between asylum governance and the clinic, this book presents considerations on classification that still resound today, and provides valuable reading for scholars interested in the social history of medicine, the history of psychiatry, and the history of science.

Peau et corps blessé dans la Grande-Bretagne victorienne

Reporting Skin and the Wounded Body in Victorian Britain
 

Diana Garrisi
 

Palgrave Macmillan Cham
Published: 06 December 2024
ISBN : 978-3-031-75367-1




Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, this book explains what made skin newsworthy in Victorian Britain. It represents a unique contribution to the media history of the human body by delving into the cultural and historical underpinnings of wound representation in Western culture. Employing a case study approach, the book provides a comprehensive exploration of the interplay between dermatology and the Victorian press. This work suggests that there was a mutually constitutive relationship between skin reporting and the formal evolution of news discourse during the nineteenth century. Narratives related to skin, such as wounds caused by corporal punishment, plagues resulting from neglect in workhouses, and occupational skin diseases, emerged as defining features of Victorian newspapers. Notably, media coverage of wounded skin assumed a central rhetorical position in debates pertaining to discipline, abuse, poverty, labour, and social norms, a legacy still discernible in contemporary journalism. Analysing the mediation of the wounded body in Victorian Britain offers a unique insight into the foundations of modern journalism. It sheds light on the impossibility of maintaining an objective framework when observing and reporting on bodies in pain. Paradoxically, news writers and commentators of that era navigated this challenge by encapsulating such narratives within rhetorical constructs that provided a template for the evolution of contemporary news values.

Bourses doctorales à la Wellcome Collection

Two collaborative PhD studentships at Wellcome Collection

Call for applications

 

We are currently advertising two UKRI AHRC-funded collaborative PhD studentships at Wellcome Collection working with European medieval and early modern collections, with upcoming deadlines this month (these studentships have tight application turnarounds). International students are eligible to apply. However, UKRI funding will not cover the difference in international fees set by universities. 

Reaching to the stars: astrology and the body in the past, present and future with Kingston School of Art – application deadline midday GMT on Wednesday 15 January 2025. An expanded art practice project exploring these research questions:- How can expanded art practice communicate the value of historical collections for understanding contemporary relationships to the body, offering audiences new understandings of their own health and wellbeing? - How might the mobilisation of European ideas about the observational relationship between macrocosm and microcosm provoke interventions into contemporary discourses on alternative health, wellbeing, and the relationship between self and planet? - How can such practice place historical European ideas of bodily health in dialogue with global communities, gendered discourses on the body, and changing definitions of illness and disability?

For full details, see Research degree funding opportunities at Kingston School of Art and AHRC Techne funded Collaborative Doctoral Award (Kingston University/Wellcome Collection). at Kingston University. 

 

Translating Monstrosity: Constructions of Difference in Early Modern England and France with UCL History – application deadline 5pm GMT on Friday 31 January 2025. Drawing on Wellcome Collection’s rich holdings and early modern objects at UCL Special Collections, the project examines how bodily, racial and sexual difference were constructed in England between 1550 and 1700 and how French texts and images were adapted and reframed for English audiences. This research will contribute to on-going work addressing problematic and discriminatory terminology in catalogue records of historic materials. The student will have opportunities to organise multidisciplinary workshops, engage in knowledge exchange with museum and library staff, and share findings with public audiences. This project will be supervised by Dr Elaine Leong and Professor Jason Peacey at UCL History, and Dr Elma Brenner at Wellcome Collection. The student will also be supported by an advisory team which includes special collections librarians, cataloguers and public engagement specialists.This studentship is funded by a LAHP Collaborative Doctoral Award and includes a stipend at the Research Council UK Home/EU rate (£21, 237 per annum – 2024-25 rate) plus UK tuition fees for three and a half years, and additional funding from Wellcome Collection consisting of up to £1500 research expenses per annum and funds to organise workshops or knowledge exchange events. LAHP welcomes applications from both ‘home’ and 'international’ (including EU) applicants. Applicants should have an undergraduate degree in a relevant discipline, and a Masters level qualification or equivalent which meets AHRC requirements for research training. Applicants with relevant work/professional experience (e.g. in libraries, archives and heritage institutions) who are considering doing a PhD are also encouraged to apply. Funding is available for full-time and part-time students. Due to the research topic, reading ability of French is desirable and willingness to gain reading proficiency of early modern French is essential. LAHP AHRC-funded students can apply to the LAHP Language Fund to support training costs. Further information about the project and the application process can be found on this webpage. The deadline for applications is 5 pm Friday 31st January 2025. Please note that applicants also need to apply to UCL History for a PhD place. More information on applying to the UCL History MPhil/PhD programme can be found on this webpage. For further information about the project or to request an informal conversation about the application process, please contact Elaine Leong (e.leong@ucl.ac.uk).


Please do get in touch with me if you would like more information about these projects or have any questions,

Santé et colonisation

Santé et colonisation


SZG/RSH/RSS 74, 2024, No. 3



Guillaume Linte: Syphilis exotique. Comment la médecine a fait de la syphilis une maladie dermatologique «bénigne» durant la colonisation (France, 1900–1940), S. 317–333

Nina Studer: «Mahomet Implanted a Real Neuropathic State in the Brains of Believers»: North African Masculinities and Colonial Psychiatry in the Writings of Maurice Boigey, S. 334–350

Idrisse Désiré Machia A Rim, Alexis Armélien Gasisou: La mission de Bâle au Cameroun sous domination allemande: esquisse historique d’une présence sanitaire (1884–1916), S. 351–366

Francesca Arena, Guillaume Linte: Entretien avec Laurence Monnais Professeure en histoire de la santé publique à l’Institut des Humanités en Médecine (Université de Lausanne et Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois), S. 367–378

La vitalité des morts dans les sociétés médiévales

Vigor Mortis. The Vitality of the Dead in Medieval Societies
 

Edited By Scott G. Bruce & Stephen Gordon 

Routledge
December 16, 2024
166 Pages
ISBN 9781032884875


This volume explores the enduring presence and participation of the dead in the lives of premodern people from the Carolingian period to the end of the Middle Ages.

Unlike modern states, which erect barriers to separate the dying and the deceased from their families, friends, and associates, premodern societies in western Europe fostered an on-going relationship between the living and the dead that was mutually beneficial to both parties. As these studies show, the dead had many means at their disposal to communicate their needs and disaffection, including ghostly visitations and unquiet corpses. For their part, medieval authors told stories about the fate of the dead and the geography of the afterlife to dissuade sinful behaviour and foster virtue in preparation for the Last Judgment. Premodern hauntings also serve as a useful metaphor for the uncertainty of archival research in recovering past voices and for the racial presumptions that inform our reconstruction of the western Middle Ages.

This book will appeal to scholars and students of history and literature, especially those interested in the concept of death in the medieval period. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Medieval History.

Le gras et le corps dans le long XIXe siècle

Fat and the Body in the Long Nineteenth Century: Meanings, Measures, and Representations

Edited by Amy Shaw and Lynn Kennedy

 

University of Toronto Press
January 2025


In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the body was a key focus of discourse. Fat and the Body in the Long Nineteenth Century animates discussion and analyses of fatness, highlighting how corporeal expectations fit into larger social systems and showing how interpretations have shifted over time. This collection examines a host of primary sources – including literature, art, medical treatises, journalism, political cartoons, soldiers’ letters home, and popular fiction – to identify trends in how fat was perceived and promoted in the English-speaking world over the long nineteenth century.

Divided into four thematic sections, the book addresses epistemologies, artistic and literary representations, the turn towards quantification and measurement, and the connections to imperialism and colonialism. It explores the complex debate about the meaning of fat and its signalling of health, beauty, moral strength, and class status. The book shows how contemporary presentations and discussions of fat offer insights into ideals of gender and race and the processes of imperialism and of professionalization in the social sciences and medicine. By tracing how debates shifted over time, the book ultimately reveals that there was no universal interpretation of fat as a positive or negative characteristic throughout the nineteenth century.