Season 4 – Healing & Medicine

The fourth and final season of ELBOW Talks discusses the themes of our international conference, organised 11.–13. March 2026 in Helsinki.

In our conference Between Marginal and Mainstream: Negotiating Experimental Practices and Medical Knowledge, we discuss the margins and various forms of medical knowledge and healing practices in the past. These are the themes we cover also in this season of ELBOW Talks.

The fourth season of ELBOW Talks investigates marginal and experimental forms of healing and medicine in many curious ways. We discuss conflicting practices in defining one’s sex in early modern Spain; the relation between unicorns and science in early modern Russia; the role of sympathy in treating patients in 19th century Britain; the cultural meanings of matted hair in 19th century Poland; female surgeons and their patients in early modern Germany; and medicating a life-threatening condition.

In Season 4, we were interested in following questions:

Healing Practices

How were patients with different diseases and pains treated? What were the outcomes like when dominant medical practices and either experimental or ’people’s medicine’ collided?

Medical Knowledge

Which practices were used in defining the patients with their needs? How did these practices form medical knowledge?

Materiality and Discursivity

In which ways the cultural beliefs, norms, and ideals affected the healing practices? And how was materiality – for instance the body and its qualities – embedded with cultural meanings?