Seminar: Using documentary analysis to understand self-diagnosis amongst natural philosophers and physicians

This month’s research seminar from the Community and Health Research Unit and the Lincoln Institute for health will be given by Professor Anna Marie Roos, Professor of the History of Science and Medicine from the School of History and Heritage. The seminar will take place on Tuesday 17th September at 11:00 in SSB0203, Sarah Swift Building. Please e-mail Sue Bowler to register sbowler@lincoln.ac.uk

Using documentary analysis to understand self-diagnosis amongst natural philosophers and physicians.

This seminar illustrates the use of documentary analysis and its subject matter relates to ‘Treating yourself: self-diagnosis amongst natural philosophers and physicians and the early modern medical case study. In: Testimonies: states of mind and states of the body in the early modern period. Springer, New York.’ To test the parameters of the extent to which bodily health, bodily pain and the development of a uniquely scientific understanding of nature were experienced and expressed, this talk will analyse three cases where early modern English physicians and natural philosophers made a diagnosis. But in these cases of John Wilkins (1614-72), Martin Lister (1639-1712), and John Ray (1627-1705), their descriptions and diagnoses were of their own illnesses, their descriptions were not in a published treatise, but in private correspondence. As their own bodies were a dataset, examining their letters elucidates where datasets and mindsets meet in the seventeenth century. On the one hand, Wilkins Lister, and Ray displayed clinical detachment and a high level of empirical detail about their own suffering. They were their own experimental subjects. On the other hand, they expressed emotional despair too along with data presentation, and their own pain was pre-Cartesian, a broken state of nature. One might argue that the private nature of their correspondence makes these sources problematic for analyses of public scientific practice, but in the case of Lister, his medical case was published anonymously in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and reprinted in his Letters and Mixt Discourses. This incidence in itself assists us in elucidating norms for formulation and publication of early modern medical and scientific case studies.

Story submitted by Sue Bowler
sbowler@lincoln.ac.uk