The International conference Between Marginal and Mainstream is held at the University of Helsinki on 11–13 March 2026.
DAY 1 – 11 March 2026
9:30-10:15 Registration and coffee / Main building, small hall lobby
10:15-10:30 Opening words / Main building, small hall F4050
10:30–12:00 Keynote 1 / Main building, small hall F4050
Lauren Kassell: Bedside Medicine in Early Modern England
12:00–13:30 Lunch
13:30–15:00 Session 1A Religion and folk healing / Main building, small hall F4050
Jagriti: State, Religion and Health: A case study of Kashmir Medical Mission, 1863-1904
Ulla Ijäs: Pastors wives and medical knowledge in the 19th century Finland
Eduardo Ángel Cruz: The Saints’ Secret Nurses: Indigenous and Afro-Latin Women Testing Cures in Colonial Miracle Records
13:30–15:00 Session 1B Minds, bodies, and nerves / Main building F3017
Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon: Irreconcilable experiences? Conflicting sources of medical knowledge and practices in Bernard Mandeville’s Treatise of Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases (1730)
Mona Mannevuo: “Neurasthenia is not a new name for hysteria” – Diagnosis of neurasthenia in late nineteenth-century medical literature
Katja Palokangas: Mental assessments in homicide cases in the 19th century Finland
15:00-15:30 Coffee / Main building, small hall lobby
15:30–17:00 Session 2A Medical Electricity / Main building, small hall F4050
Soile Ylivuori: Experimenting with Eels – Colonial Space and Medical Electricity in the Eighteenth Century
Saara-Maija Kontturi: Scientific Optimism, Skepticism, and Developing Methodology in Medical Electricity in Sweden and Finland
Stefan Schröder: A Universal Remedy or Bogus? The Coverage of the Contested Science of Medical Electricity in Mid-Eighteenth-Century German Newspapers
15:30–17:00 Session 2B Embodied medical knowledge / Main building F3017
Tilmann Walter: When Clinical Knowledge Became Mainstream: Therapy in the Letters and Consils of the Imperial Physician Johannes Crato (1519–85)
Ùna Faller: The green-sick body and her embodied knowledge of green sickness, or the ‘disease of virgins’
Edna Huotari: The Embodied and Electric patient in Revolutionary France
17:00–19:00 Wine Reception / Main building, small hall lobby
DAY 2– 12 March 2026
10:00–10:30 Coffee / Main building, small hall lobby
10:30–12:00 Keynote 2 / Main building, small hall F4050
Markku Hokkanen: Negotiating healing between marginal and mainstream: experimentation and cross-cultural medical encounters in South-Central Africa, c. 1850s-1900s
12:00–13:30 Lunch
13:30–15:00 Session 3A ELBOW Talks Hybrid Session / Main building, small hall F4050
Clare Griffin: The Science of Unicorns: Early Modern Russia’s Only Drug Trial
Clarice Säävälä: “He does me real good by his kindness”: The Role of Sympathy in Healing the Patient in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Marek Maj: Matted hair as fetish object: bodily experimentation in the nineteenth-century Polish countryside
13:30–15:00 Session 3B Between Folk Healing and Medicine / Main building F3017
Moshumee Dewoo: Epistemologies of the Earth: Animist and European Medical Legitimisation in Southern African Medicine
Elena Badanai: From Folklore to Medical Science in Post-Unified Italy
Annika Raapke: Bodies on the Rock: Treating Disease in Swedish St. Barthelemy
13:30–15:00 Session 3C Surgeons and surgery / Main building U4072
Anu Lahtinen & Mirkka Lappalainen: Craftsmen in Medicine: Barber-surgeons in Early 17th Century Stockholm
Samu Sarviaho: Barber-surgeons in Transition: Medical Practice and Changes in Treatment in 1800s Finland
Karolina Kouvola: Healing Testicular Cancer in Nineteenth-Century Finland: The Case of a Parish Clerk
15:00–15:30 Coffee / Main building, small hall lobby
15:30–17:00 Session 4A Medical Epistemes / Main building, small hall F4050
Mursed Alam: Marginal Medicalities from South Asia: Colonial Biopolitics, Decolonial Aporia and Indigenous Survival Epistemes
Claire Crignon: Observing Folk Practices and Beliefs About Healing and Curing: The Importance of Bacon’s Natural Histories in Understanding His Skeptical View of Medical Progress (1605-1638)
Shawn M. Phillips: Experimentation, Morality, & Therapeutics: Mercurial Cures and Shifting Applications from Humoral Theory to Germ Theory
15:30–17:00 Session 4B Ointments and elixirs / Main building F3017
Aleksi Moine: Christ’s Blood and Mary’s Milk – Religion, Ointments and Bodies in 19th-Century Finno-Karelian Healing Incantations
Brian Li: Staving off Hunger for 100 days: A Close Reading of Lapidary Elixirs in the Bencao gangmu
Tarquin Holmes: A Disgusting and useless substance? A Brief History of Hyraceum
18:00 Conference dinner
DAY 3 – 13 March 2026
10:00–10:30 Coffee / Main building, small hall lobby
10:30-12:00 Keynote 3 / Main building, small hall F4050
Paola Bertucci: The Anatomy of the Living: Occupational Health between Medical Knowledge and Statecraft
12:00-13:30 Lunch
13:30–15:00 Session 5A Drinking health / Main building, small hall F4050
Yiyun Huang: Panacea or pernicious drug: Situating Chinese Tea in Early Modern European Medicine
Kim Embrey: From Sacred Leaf to Scientific Specimen
François Zanetti: Too good to be true – Debates on evaluation procedures for mineral waters in the 18th c.
13:30–15:00 Session 5B Religion and medicine / Main building, Studium 1 F3020
Dan Blackie: Medicine, Faith, and Disability in Late Georgian England
Auli Saarsalmi-Paalasmaa: The Training of Nurses in Seventh-day Adventists’ St. Helena Nursing School
Riikka Miettinen: Medical Pluralism and Religious Intersections in Healing Madness in Early Modern Sweden
15:00–15:30 Coffee / Main building, small hall lobby
15:30–17:00 Session 6A Colonial medicine / Main building, small hall F4050
Eva Johanna Holmberg: Distempered with Greeuous Sicknesses: Healing and Experimenting with the Badly ‘Environed’ Body of Thomas West, Lord De La Warr in Virginia, 1610-11
Delphine Peiretti-Courtis: A History of Medical Errors : Studies, Experiences, and Care Practices on Black Bodies in the French Colonies of Africa (1780-1910)
Chechesh Kudachinova: Creating Colonial Healing and Making Experiential Knowledge in 17th-Century Settler Siberia
15:30–17:00 Session 6B Natural healing / Main building, Studium 1 F3020
Eeva Heinonen: Unveiling the Materiality of Nature in the Early Modern Medical Discourse
Suvi Rytty: Embodied Experience in Natural Healing Narratives in Early Twentieth-Century Finland
Pieter Dhondt: Challenging the Orthodoxy of Medical Knowledge by Promoting Homeopathy as an Academic Subject Around 1900
Elbow 