Anita Guerrini – The Whiteness of Bones: The Emergence of the Human Skeleton as a Commodity, 1500-1800

Heyman Center for the Humanities, Second Floor Common Room

Speaker: Anita Guerrini, Horning Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History, Oregon Statue University

Respondent: Pamela H. Smith, Seth Low Professor of History, Columbia University

This event is part of the series, Explorations in the Medical Humanities. Additional details coming soon. Please visit the Heyman Center website for updates.

About the Series:

As a set of disciplines, the humanities face the challenge of how to write about embodied experiences that resist easy verbal categorization such as illness, pain, and healing. The recent emergence of interdisciplinary frameworks such as narrative medicine goes some way to address these challenges. Yet conceptualizing a field of medical humanities also offers a broader umbrella under which to study the influence of medico-scientific ideas and practices on society.  Whether by incorporating material culture such as medical artefacts, performing symptomatic readings of poems and novels, or excavating the implicit medical assumptions underlying auditory cultures, the approaches that emerge from a historiographical or interpretive framework are different from those coming from the physician’s black bag.

Sponsored by The Society of Fellows in the Humanities, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Center for Science and Society.