‘Getting’ the Pox: Reflections by an Historian on How to Write the History of Early Modern Disease
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5324/njsts.v2i1.2137Abstract
This article reflects upon the recent return to linear history writing in medical history. It takes as its starting point a critique of the current return to constructivist ideas, suggesting the use of other methodological choices and interpretations to the surviving archival and textural sources of the sixteenth century pox. My investigation analyses the diagnostic act as an effort to bring together a study of medical semiotics. Medical semiotics considers how signs speak through the physical body, coached within a particular epistemology. There are no hidden meanings behind the visible sign or symptom - it is tranparent to the calculative and authoritative gaze and language of the doctor. It concerns how diseases came into being, the relationships they have constituted, the power they have secured and the actual knowledge/power they have eclipsed or are eclipsing. From such a perspective, “getting the pox” is not a bad thing. A methodological turn to medical semiotics reminds us that the history of disease should be an inquiry both into the grounds of our current knowledge and beliefs about disease and how they inspire our writing, as well as the analytical categories that establish their inevitability.Downloads
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References
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Hamlin, C. 2009. Cholera: The Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Nance, B. 2001. Turquet de Mayerne as Baroque Physician: The Art of Medical Portraiture. Amsterdam and New York.
Quetel, C. 1992. History of Syphilis. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Roper, L. 1991. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Early Modern Augsburg. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Rosenberg, C.E. and J. Golden (eds.). 1992. Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History. New Brunswig: Rudgers University Press.
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Stein, C. 2009. Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Tattersall, R. 2009. Diabetes: The Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wear, A. 2000. Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, A. 2000. On the History of Disease-Concepts: The Case of Pleurisy. History of Science 38: 271-319.
Wolff, J. 2012. The Human Right to Health. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Bloch, I. 1901. Der Ursprung der Syphilis: Eine medizinhistorische und kulturgeschichtliche Untersuchung. Teil 1: Ursprung der Syphilis. Jena: Voss.
Bloch, I. and G. Loewenstein. 1912. Prostitution.
Burckhardt, J. 1990 [1878] The Civilization of the Renaissance. London: Penguin Classics.
Cooter, R. 2006. “Framing” the End of the Social History of Medicine’, in Huisman, F. and J. H. Warner (eds.), Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press:309 – 337.
Cooter, R. and C. Stein. 2013. Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine. New Haven: Yale.
Cunningham, A. 2002. Identifying Disease in the Past: Cutting through the Gordian Knot. Asclepio, 54: 13-34.
Duden, B. 1992. The Women Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge, MA.
Fabricius, J. 1994. Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England. London: Jessica Kingsley Publisher.
Fissell, M. 2004. Vernacular Bodies: the Politics of Early Modern England. Oxford.
Foucault, M. 1973 [1963]. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. London: Tavistock Publishers
Foucault, M. 1989 [1966]. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London and New York: Routledge.
Gilmann, S. 2011. Representing Health and Illness: Thoughts for the Twenty-First Century, Medical History, 55: 295–300.
Gilman, S. 2009. Obesity: The Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hacking, I. 2000. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hamlin, C. 2009. Cholera: The Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jackson, M. 2009. Asthma: The Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jones, C. and L. Brockliss. 1997. The Medical World of Early Modern France. Cambridge.
King, L. 1980. What is Disease? in Caplan, A. et al. (eds), Concepts of Health and Disease: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Boston: Addison-Wesley.
Latour, B. 2000. On the Partial Existence of Existing and Nonexisting Objects, in Daston, L. (ed.), Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago: Chicago University.
Maclean, I. 2002. Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine. Cambridge.
Nance, B. 2001. Turquet de Mayerne as Baroque Physician: The Art of Medical Portraiture. Amsterdam and New York.
Quetel, C. 1992. History of Syphilis. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Roper, L. 1991. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Early Modern Augsburg. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rosenberg, C.E. 1989. Disease in History: Frames and Framers, Milbank Quarterly, 67:1-15.
Rosenberg, C.E. and J. Golden (eds.). 1992. Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History. New Brunswig: Rudgers University Press.
Sauerteig, L. 1999. Krankheit, Sexualität, Gesellschaft. Geschlechtskrankheiten und Gesundheitspolitik in Deutschland im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Steiner.
Schuster, P. 1992. Das Frauenhaus: Städtische Bordelle in Deutschland, 1350-1600. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh.
Siraisi, N. 2002. Disease and Symptom as Problematic Concepts in Renaissance Medicine, in Kessler, E. and I. Maclean (eds), Res et Verba in the Renaisssance.
Wiesbaden.
Stein, C. 2009. Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Tattersall, R. 2009. Diabetes: The Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wear, A. 2000. Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, A. 2000. On the History of Disease-Concepts: The Case of Pleurisy. History of Science 38: 271-319.
Wolff, J. 2012. The Human Right to Health. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.
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2016-12-01
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