Eating Nasty Things (reposted)
[This is a reposting of a post from 2014 that seems to have spirited itself away. Fortunately I had a copy of the content tucked safely away...] This post is inspired partly by a paper written in 1976, but which I have only just come across (Frank Paul Bowman, “Suffering,Madness and Literary Creation in Seventeenth-Century…
Early Modern Medicine: A new online resource
The Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR) is starting a new series of digital material. The first video in the series, Vegetable Harmonies, a short video with the Illuminations by Gherardo Cybo (1512-1600) on Mattioli's Discorsi sopra la Materia Medica di Dioscoride Pedacio (BL Ms Additional 22333) accompanied by …
Two new books on the history of pain
Continuing my attempt to keep up with research in the field, here are two recent publications in the field of medical humanities. Rob Boddice (ed.), Pain and Emotion in Modern History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Chapters by Rob Boddice, Javier Mocoso, Paolo Santangelo, David Biro, Joanna Bourke, Wilfried Witte, NouĂ©mi Tousignant, Sheen…
On Placebos
Probably of relevance to Daniel Goldberg's comments on the history of pain (which I commented on in my last post) is Charles Rosenberg on 'The Efficacy of Placebos: A Historian’s Perspective' (Harvard, May 21). Goldberg has quite a lot to say about placebos, and their place in the history of the perception of pain, and Rosenberg…
On the Treatment of Pain
My attention was caught by two recent publications in the blog of The Appendix ('a quarterly journal of experimental and narrative history'). The first is 'Interpreting “Physick”: The Familiar and Foreign Eighteenth-Century Body', by Lindsay Keiter. The second, in reply to the former, is Daniel S. Goldberg on 'The History of Pain' [UPDATE: Goldberg…
Surgical Implements
A couple of weeks ago I posted in answer to a question on Quora about whether there was such a thing as necessary suffering. I began by saying that in an age before anaesthetics this question could hardly even have been asked. I then went on, in my wonted fashion, to discuss the issue in…
Conference Podcast: Pain, Piety and Ageing: Sacred Suffering in Early Modern Portraits of Old Women
Dr. Erin Campbell gives a paper at Pain and Old Age: Three Centuries of Suffering in Silence?, a conference held by the Birkbeck Pain Project and Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities on October 27, 2012. Here's the link. To listen directly to the podcast, click here. a…
Dissection and anatomy
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (Routledge, 1995; paperback, 1996) This book gives a fascinating account the beginnings of scientific rationalism, and the way in which the body came to be seen as a kind of machine, with a wide array of sources ranging from the literary and…
