Between Marginal and Mainstream: Negotiating Experimental Practices and Medical Knowledge, 1600–1900

Healing is a social practice that cuts through all social classes and categories. Sickness is a shared historical experience, and the need to explain, contain, and cure it has been prevalent in all historical societies. Conceptualisations of illness and methods of healing have, however, differed significantly in different cultures, societies, and temporal moments, as healing practices are deeply entangled with religion, social rituals, and cultural beliefs (Porter, 1997). 

The question of experiment is at the core of knowledge and practices of healing. Following the so-called ‘scientific revolution’, new medical knowledge has increasingly been both gained and tested through experimentation, but development of cures through trial-and-error has a much longer and epistemologically multivalent history. 

This international conference explores how different forms of experimental practices have been used to gain knowledge around healing and the human body at large both within and outside scholarly medicine. Our goal is to access and examine how experimentation has taken place and shaped knowledge around questions of health and healing roughly between the years 1600 and 1900. 

Rather than being wedded to enforcing any teleological narrative of the ‘victorious progress of normal science’, we are interested in the multiplicity of perspectives, voices, and narratives which make up the history of medicine—with  ‘medicine’ understood in the broadest of terms to mean elite, mainstream, scholarly, and orthodox approaches as well as folk, popular, magical, or alternative practices, leaning on the concept of medical pluralism (e.g. Jütte 2013; Hokkanen & Kananoja  2019; Ernst, 2002). In other words, we are interested in the contingent processes, manifold methods, and implicit power structures through which different forms of experimental healing practices either became a normalised and respectable part of established medicine, or were forgotten or labelled as quackery, folk medicine, superstition, or pseudoscience.  

These questions have been foregrounded by researchers examining the birth of ‘normal science’ (e.g. Fara, 2003; McCalman, 2006; Porter, 1988; Stolberg 2003), as well as scholarship on the situatedness of knowledges and the myth of ‘scientific objectivity’, pointing out how normalisation of certain forms of knowledge is a social process, dependent on societies’ gendered, classed, and racialised norms (e.g. Haraway, 1988; Schiebinger, 1993). Such questions are still relevant today, perhaps now more than ever, with the rapid development of new medical technologies on the one hand, and the rise of science denialism, anti-vaxx movement, and popularity of alternative therapies on the other. 

About ELBOW research

The conference is organised by the ERC-funded project ‘Medical Electricity, Embodied Experiences, and Knowledge Construction in Europe and the Atlantic World, c. 1740–1840’ (ELBOW). The project explores the way people interacted with electricity in the context of medicine, how they experienced electricity through their bodies, and how they understood and produced knowledge on electricity based on their experiences. The conference organisers are planning to edit and publish a collection of essays/a theme issue on an international journal based on selected papers from the conference. 

References

Bivins, Roberta, Alternative Medicine: A History (Oxford University Press, 2007). 

Ernst, Waltraud, Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800–2000 (Routledge, 2002). 

Fara, Patricia, ‘Marginalized Practices’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Cambridge History of Science IV (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 485–508. 

Haraway, Donna, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14:3 (1988), 575–599. 

Hokkanen, Markku & Kananoja, Kalle, Healers and Empires in Global History: Healing as Hybrid and Contested Knowledge (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019). 

Jütte, Robert, Geschichte der alternativen Medizin: von der Volksmedizin zu den unkonventionellen Therapien von heute (Beck, 1996). 

Jütte, Robert (ed.), Medical Pluralism: Past – Present – Future (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013). 

McCalman, Iain, ‘Spectres of Quackery: The Fragile Career of Philippe de Loutherbourg’, Cultural & Social History 3:3 (2006), 341–54. 

Porter, Roy, ‘Before the Fringe: “Quackery” and the Eighteenth-Century Medical Market’, in Roger Cooter (ed.) Studies in the History of Alternative Medicine (Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 1–27. 

Schiebinger, Londa, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Beacon, 1993). 

Stolberg, Michael, Homo patiens. Krankheits- und Körpererfahrung in der Frühen Neuzeit (Böhlau, 2003).