Médecine, environnement et santé

Medicine, Environment and Health in the Eastern Mediterranean World (1400-1750)

Call for Papers

3-4 April 2017, Christ's College, Cambridge UK

Organised by Valentina Pugliano (University of Cambridge) and Nukhet Varlik (Rutgers-Newark University)

Sponsored by The Wellcome Trust; Christ's College, Cambridge; and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge.

This conference aims to offer, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of medicine, environment and health in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, ca. 1400-1750. While a considerable body of scholarship exists on Islamic and Byzantine science and medicine and their influence on the medieval Latin West, the state of medical theory and practice in the following centuries has been comparatively neglected and often spoken of in terms of intellectual stagnation and decline. The conference aims to challenge this narrative and reveal the continued vitality of knowledge making and transfer across the eastern Mediterranean world. Taking as our focus the politically heterogeneous southern Europe and eastern Mediterranean, the Mamluk Kingdom, and the Ottoman Empire, we aim to reconstruct the healthscape of this region in the early modern period, exploring its medical unity and disunity and the human and environmental factors that played a part in it. (Please find a more detailed description enclosed.)

Confirmed speakers include Sonja Brentjes (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Peregrine Horden (Royal Holloway), Harun Kucuk (University of Pennsylvania), Gianna Pomata (Johns Hopkins), and Miri Shefer-Mossensohn (Tel Aviv University).

We hope to include a selection of the papers presented at the conference in an edited volume currently under negotiation with Cambridge University Press.

Conference dinner and one night of accommodation at Christ's College will be provided, and help will be available to secure additional nights of accommodation. Speakers will be responsible for making their own travel arrangements. Limited financial assistance may be available pending funding.

Please submit a title, abstract of 300 words, and a CV jointly to the organisers Valentina Pugliano and Nukhet Varlik at <medicineeasternmediterranean@gmail.com> by 30 June 2016.