History and dementia are both concerned with time. Writing history is all about folding time, making sense of things that have become confused and confusing with the passage of time by bringing different points into contact. And dementia, as the reflections in this series show, suggest different ways of experiencing and enacting time. These variations in dealing with time …
Tag Archives: History of Medicine
Immunity and (Anti-)Vaccination: Histories, Metaphors, Theories – A Syllabus
The natural body meets the body politic in the act of vaccination, where a single needle penetrates both. – Eula Biss, On Immunity
In recent years, outbreaks of highly contagious diseases like measles and whooping cough have reached epidemic proportions in the US. Such a resurgence in supposedly eradicated diseases has been attributed to rising rates of vaccine refusal in …
Projit Bihari Mukharji’s Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences
Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences
University of Chicago Press, 2016. 376 pages.
In a sequel to his 2009 Nationalizing the Body, Projit Bihari Mukharji returns to late-colonial South Asia to investigate the modernization of Ayurvedic science and medicine in Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences. This time, Mukharji plunges …
Working for the Race: Black Scholars, Invisible Labor, and the Baggage of Creating Space
“Critical Histories, Activist Futures: Science, Medicine and Racial Violence,” a conference hosted by Yale University in February 2017, was a welcome departure from the Anglo-centrism dominating the fields of the History of Science and Medicine (HS&M). Focusing on the history of knowledge production, dissemination, and professionalization using objects, practices, and ideas, these historical subfields too often ignore the politics of …
Critical Histories, Activist Futures: Science, Medicine and Racial Violence
A Reframed (and Reflexive) Conference Report
Organized and Edited by Tess Lanzarotta and Sarah M. Pickman
After a conference ends – after the last paper coffee cup has been tossed into the trash, after the adaptor cable has been disconnected from the podium laptop, after the speakers have rushed out to catch trains and flights homeward – what then? …
Book review: Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa
Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa
Paul Wenzel Geissler, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, and Noémi Tousignant, editors
Intellect Ltd./University of Chicago Press, 2016, 256 pages, 500 color plates
The first reaction to an encounter with Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa is likely to be …