Lecture by Dr Elaine Leong (Max Planck Institute, Berlin)
Tuesday (22nd November)
The seminar will take place in the Wellcome Library, 183 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
Doors open at 6pm prompt, the seminar will start at 6.15pm.
Doors open at 6pm prompt, the seminar will start at 6.15pm.
In recent years, the early modern household has emerged as a central site for medicine and healthcare. Through analysis of personal letters, household account books, diaries and recipe books, we have uncovered the myriad of ways in which householders sought to understand their own bodies and the natural environment around them. Within these activities, paper played a central role. Householders utilised a range of paper technologies such as notebooks and paper slips to collate, categorise and manage the vast volumes of medical knowledge they stored in anticipation of possible sickness and ill health. Concurrently, they also used paper to apply plasters and ointments to the body, to tightly close vessels containing liquid medicines, to shape rolls of pills and to make containers for the mixing of different ‘materia medica’. This talk investigates the multiple ways in which early modern English men and women used paper technologies and technologies with paper to perform quotidian tasks and codify practical knowledge. This focus on the materiality of paper, I argue, offers both a fresh perspective to conceptualise the relationship between knowledge and practice and new ways to talk about medical technologies in pre-modern medicine.
For more details see: http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2016/11/paper-medicine-and-everyday-technologies-in-the-early-modern-household/.
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