A talk by Lorraine Daston October 19, Sala degli Stemmi and online, Villa Salviati In this talk, Professor Lorraine Daston presented her newest book, ‘Rules: A Short History of What We Live By’ (Princeton, 2022). This session was part of the Histories of Knowledge seminar, organised by Prof. Lauren Kassell and Prof. Nicolas Guilhot. It was also an opportunity for other EUI members to listen and ask questions to the most prominent historian of science of our time.  Book abstract Rules order almost every aspect of our lives. They set our work hours, dictate how we drive and set the table ..read more

Throughout this year (2022-2023), the HoSM Working Group invited four professors based in Italian universities to speak about the various histories of the human mind.   In the first lecture titled Mental Faculties and the Brain Between Galenism and Renaissance Politics, Luana Salvarani (Università di Parma) presented a study and a translation of Juan Huarte’s Examen de ingenious. This treaty dating from the end of the 16th Century Spain was at the crossroads of the history of education and the history of the mind. Building on earlier conceptions of the brain and its faculties, this work h ..read more

A talk by Suman Seth In Sala del Torrino (Villa Salviati), 12 June 2023, 10:00 – 12:00 CEST Abstract: At its core are a series of reports on military medical statistics, principally authored by Alexander Tulloch, that would become the backbone for a swathe of subsequent claims about the reality and numerical value of race. Tulloch’s Statistical Reports drew on his earlier (1837) statistical defense of plantation owners’ treatment of the enslaved, published only a few years after the formal abolition of slavery. In those Reports, Tulloch made an argument for the inability of Africans to adapt ..read more

A talk by Katherine Gerbner In Sala del Torrino (Villa Salviati), 11:00-13:00 CEST Abstract: Katharine Gerbner’s presentation will examine the relationship between “Obeah” and “Science” as they emerged historically within the context of Atlantic slavery and imperialism. “Obeah”, an Afro-Caribbean term, is notoriously difficult to define, and it has been described alternately as “medicine,” “witchcraft,” and “religion.” In 1760, Obeah was criminalised following Tacky’s revolt, the largest slave uprising in the British Atlantic world, and it remains a crime in Jamaica. Today, Obeah and Science ..read more

A Talk by Deborah Coen In Sala del Torrino (Villa Salviati), 17 March 2023, 11:00 – 13:00 CET   Abstract: This presentation uses history to illuminate a profound misalignment between today’s science of climate change and the goals of climate justice. A fundamental ambivalence lies at the heart of the current scientific discourse around human “vulnerability” to climate change. This presentation argues that the scientists who set out in the late 1970s to study human vulnerability to climate change ended up — ironically and largely unintentionally — constructing an ideal of climatic invulne ..read more

History of plague and epidemic disease. 4 Novembre 2022 The corpus of texts from Antiquity known as the Galenic tradition has a long reception history. Whether in Greek, Latin and Arabic, the works of Hippocrates, Galen and others formed the nucleus for a medical tradition later added to by commentators such as Abu Bakr al-Razi (Rhazes) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Drawing on the same source texts, practices and theoretical frameworks were developed, written down not only in the languages of classical learning but in a wealth of vernaculars as well. Seeing as it is all but impossible for a single ..read more

This session organised by the EUI History of Science and Medicine Working Group features a talk by Erica Charters (Oxford University). 12 September 2022 The discipline of the history of medicine has long studied epidemics as a way to understand societies. Epidemics of early modern plague and nineteenth-century cholera, for example, have been researched to analyse the economic, political, and cultural frameworks that underpin past European societies. Building on social history methodologies, these approaches consider disease as part of society, rather than as a force external to its ..read more

In winter 2022, Professor Lauren Kassell convened a hybrid workshop on “Histories of Science and Medicine for the 21st-Century” at the European University Institute. By Jan Becker, Timo Houtekamer and Maxime Guttin The workshop offered a space for discussion for early-stage researchers around the world. Twenty-four researchers from the EUI and seven other universities— Cambridge, Zurich, Stockholm, Groningen, Berlin, Finland, and Hong Kong—participated. As we addressed the intertwined histories of medicine and science and their public uses, the workshop sought to reflect on science and medicin ..read more

Chiara Lacroix, Marie Van Haaster, Dann Grotum , Mónica Morado Vázquez and Simon Werner presented their research projects to the working group! Chiara Lacroix presented her research project on the parallel between bodily and national integrity. She explored three possible case-studies: abortion and sterilization; syphilis and tuberculosis; and fertility-promoting practices. Her presentation also reflected on the implications of using a universalist concept, such as bodily integrity, as an object as well as a tool of historical analysis. Marie van Haaster explained the ways in which she engages ..read more

Katherine Park, Harvard University/ Villa I Tatti Monday 22 November 2021, 15:00 (CET), Sala degli Stemmi, Villa Salviati, hybrid mode. Jointly organised by the History of Science and Medicine Working Group and the Queer and Feminist Studies Working Group.           Galen (129–ca. 216). De usu partium, corporis humani libri xvii. Basle: per A. Cratandrum and J. Bebelium, 1533.   In Making Sex (1990), Thomas Laqueur argued for a dramatic shift in Western medical understandings of sex difference circa 1800, falsely claiming that prior to this period, women were gen ..read more