-------- Forwarded Message --------
Using documentary analysis to understand self-diagnosis amongst natural philosophers and physicians
This month’s research seminar on 17/09/2019 from the Community and Health Research Unit and the Lincoln Institute for Health will be given by Professor Anna Marie Roos, Professor of the History of Science and Medicine from the School of History and Heritage.
This seminar illustrates the use of documentary analysis and its subject matter relates to ‘Treating yourself: self-diagnosis amongst natural philosophers and physicians and the early modern medical case study. In: Testimonies: states of mind and states of
the body in the early modern period. Springer, New York.’ To test the parameters of the extent to which bodily health, bodily pain and the development of a uniquely scientific understanding of nature were experienced and expressed, this talk will analyse three
cases where early modern English physicians and natural philosophers made a diagnosis. But in these cases of John Wilkins (1614-72), Martin Lister (1639-1712), and John Ray (1627-1705), their descriptions and diagnoses were of their own illnesses, their descriptions
were not in a published treatise, but in private correspondence. As their own bodies were a dataset, examining their letters elucidates where datasets and mindsets meet in the seventeenth century. On the one hand, Wilkins, Lister, and Ray displayed clinical
detachment and a high level of empirical detail about their own suffering. They were their own experimental subjects. On the other hand, they expressed emotional despair too along with data presentation, and their own pain was pre-Cartesian, a broken state
of nature. One might argue that the private nature of their correspondence makes these sources problematic for analyses of public scientific practice, but in the case of Lister, his medical case was published anonymously in the Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society, and reprinted in his Letters and Mixt Discourses. This incidence in itself assists us in elucidating norms for formulation and publication of early modern medical and scientific case studies.
The location is the Sarah Swift building at the University of Lincoln, ground floor, room SSB0203.
The seminar will start at 11:00, we plan to run until 12:00 including any questions and discussion and then a light lunch will be served. If you would like to come, please let Susan Bowler know (
[log in to unmask])
and particularly if you have any special dietary requirements. If you would like parking, please send your car registration number as well. The car park is likely to be a 10 minute walk from the Sarah Swift building, but there are closer pay car parks (see
attached maps). Here is a link to use on campus to help find the Sarah Swift building:
https://navigateme.lincoln.ac.uk/
########################################################################
To unsubscribe from the MERSENNE list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=MERSENNE&A=1
