Hannah Murphy
Lecturer in Early Modern History, King's College London. UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and PI "Medicine and the Making of Race, 1440-1720", Co-Investigator "Renaissance Skin" (Wellcome Trust). Curator: "Visible Skin: Rediscovering the Renaissance through Black Portraiture"
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This Supplement builds on a burgeoning body of research that approaches the archive not merely as the object, but as the subject of enquiry. It explores the phenomenon of record keeping in the early modern period in the context of significant ecclesiastical, political, intellectual and cultural developments that served as a stimulus to it: state formation, religious reformation, and economic transformation; the advent of the mechanical press, the spread of educational opportunity, and the expansion of literacy; changing epistemological conventions, shifting attitudes towards history and memory, and new modes of self-representation. The essays that comprise it focus attention on the impulses behind the surge in public and private documentation in Europe between 1500 and 1800 and place the process by which individual, collective and institutional records were created, compiled, authorised, and used under the microscope. They examine the activities of curators and scribes and analyse the issues of credibility and authenticity to which their endeavours gave rise, alongside the role of textual, pictorial, material and financial records in managing knowledge and giving expression to senses of identity. Stretching traditional, technical definitions of the record and archive, they investigate how writing and document-making of various kinds was shaped by dynamic interactions between ordinary people and by the quotidian circumstances and politics of everyday life. They also illuminate some of the multiple ways in which archives mediate and construct the past, preserving some traces of it for posterity while consigning others to permanent oblivion.
In the sixteenth century, Georg Palma (1543-1592), municipal physician in Nuremberg, put together a collection of more than 800 books, which he bequeathed on his death to the recently founded municipal library. Examining his marginalia, note-taking and the personal records of his own medical practice, my paper reconstructs Palma's reading practice as a subset of his medical activities. I argue that Palma used his library in a way that falls between medical theory and medical practice, as well as between theoretical conceptions of orality and literature. Although the library is, perhaps, the quintessentially literate institution, Palma's carefully constructed collection reflects a strong awareness of local medical knowledge. For Palma, and I argue for municipal physicians more generally, even as the sixteenth century standardized and regulated transmission of medical knowledge, educated physicians folded into learned theory medical practices that were environmental and historical, local and traditional.
In the sixteenth century, the growing profession of academically educated municipal physicians in imperial cities across Germany claimed a monopoly on the practice of diagnosing disease. On the basis of this, they carved out jurisdiction over municipal healthcare, and authority over other medical professionals. Moving from the medieval definition of the art of the physician as 'inner medicine' bound to a geographic taxonomy of the body, these early modern physicians implemented a new kind of semiology - a practical interpretation of the relationship between hidden signs and material indicators.
My paper examines the role of the 'new' medical sciences in creating and shaping this emphasis on diagnosis. Focusing on the anatomical treatises by Volcher Coiter and the botanical writings of Joachim Camerarius, two physicians and colleagues in Nuremberg, it restates the relationship between anatomy and botany, habitually considered separately. Reading these texts together, my paper looks at the development of tactile medical practice, medical observation and examination, and - crucially - the concept of extraction, as the intellectual foundations of medical practice in the sixteenth century. Anatomy and botany were first and foremost medical: both Coiter and Camerarius expressed dissatisfaction with the inabilities of traditional medicine to adequately grasp the complex demands of disease and its treatments. Digging, whether in bodies or in dirt, yielded a new methodology, in which previously hidden, invisible signs could be extracted, held up and examined. In so doing, it changed the orientation of municipal physicians toward a concept of medicine that privileged not only diagnosis, but clinical, pharmaceutical and material treatments as well.
This Supplement builds on a burgeoning body of research that approaches the archive not merely as the object, but as the subject of enquiry. It explores the phenomenon of record keeping in the early modern period in the context of significant ecclesiastical, political, intellectual and cultural developments that served as a stimulus to it: state formation, religious reformation, and economic transformation; the advent of the mechanical press, the spread of educational opportunity, and the expansion of literacy; changing epistemological conventions, shifting attitudes towards history and memory, and new modes of self-representation. The essays that comprise it focus attention on the impulses behind the surge in public and private documentation in Europe between 1500 and 1800 and place the process by which individual, collective and institutional records were created, compiled, authorised, and used under the microscope. They examine the activities of curators and scribes and analyse the issues of credibility and authenticity to which their endeavours gave rise, alongside the role of textual, pictorial, material and financial records in managing knowledge and giving expression to senses of identity. Stretching traditional, technical definitions of the record and archive, they investigate how writing and document-making of various kinds was shaped by dynamic interactions between ordinary people and by the quotidian circumstances and politics of everyday life. They also illuminate some of the multiple ways in which archives mediate and construct the past, preserving some traces of it for posterity while consigning others to permanent oblivion.
In the sixteenth century, Georg Palma (1543-1592), municipal physician in Nuremberg, put together a collection of more than 800 books, which he bequeathed on his death to the recently founded municipal library. Examining his marginalia, note-taking and the personal records of his own medical practice, my paper reconstructs Palma's reading practice as a subset of his medical activities. I argue that Palma used his library in a way that falls between medical theory and medical practice, as well as between theoretical conceptions of orality and literature. Although the library is, perhaps, the quintessentially literate institution, Palma's carefully constructed collection reflects a strong awareness of local medical knowledge. For Palma, and I argue for municipal physicians more generally, even as the sixteenth century standardized and regulated transmission of medical knowledge, educated physicians folded into learned theory medical practices that were environmental and historical, local and traditional.
In the sixteenth century, the growing profession of academically educated municipal physicians in imperial cities across Germany claimed a monopoly on the practice of diagnosing disease. On the basis of this, they carved out jurisdiction over municipal healthcare, and authority over other medical professionals. Moving from the medieval definition of the art of the physician as 'inner medicine' bound to a geographic taxonomy of the body, these early modern physicians implemented a new kind of semiology - a practical interpretation of the relationship between hidden signs and material indicators.
My paper examines the role of the 'new' medical sciences in creating and shaping this emphasis on diagnosis. Focusing on the anatomical treatises by Volcher Coiter and the botanical writings of Joachim Camerarius, two physicians and colleagues in Nuremberg, it restates the relationship between anatomy and botany, habitually considered separately. Reading these texts together, my paper looks at the development of tactile medical practice, medical observation and examination, and - crucially - the concept of extraction, as the intellectual foundations of medical practice in the sixteenth century. Anatomy and botany were first and foremost medical: both Coiter and Camerarius expressed dissatisfaction with the inabilities of traditional medicine to adequately grasp the complex demands of disease and its treatments. Digging, whether in bodies or in dirt, yielded a new methodology, in which previously hidden, invisible signs could be extracted, held up and examined. In so doing, it changed the orientation of municipal physicians toward a concept of medicine that privileged not only diagnosis, but clinical, pharmaceutical and material treatments as well.