This event follows on from the Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Skills Workshop on the Medical Humanities at the Queen’s University Belfast on November 7:
The paths of medical un/orthodoxy? Colonial Latin America and its World
8-9 November 2013, Queen’s University Belfast
This colloquium aims to discuss the different processes by which individuals and ideas impacted on the promotion, defence, criticism, or prohibition of medical practices in early modern Latin America and the tensions lying therein. David Wootton has argued that histories of progress are ‘written on the assumption that there is a logic of discovery’ when in fact it may be more illuminating to discuss ‘delay’, ‘non-events’, ‘underdetermination’ and examples of where knowledge and therapy do not always go ‘hand in hand’ (Bad Medicine, 2007). This should lead us to consider those individuals and practices that existed between and alongside the recognised tales of success that have not received the same amount of scholarly attention.
Key themes: means by which cures, medical, and surgical practices were tested, criticised, promoted, or censored (geographical, institutional, print, music); the creation and differing perceptions of medical ‘heroes’ or ‘anti heroes’ within the social conscience or medical rhetoric; the use of language in medical reports, correspondence, and texts as a form of social control; the impact of successful and unsuccessful uses of patronage systems; the use of networks (local, inter-American, trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific) or the lack thereof; the interplay between Indigenous, African, Criollo, or European practices; tensions between institutions in the exercise of medicine.
By considering these and other questions we hope to deepen our understanding of the intricacies of medical science and its systems in early modern Latin America, and explore the contexts for establishing medical practices as well as the means by which local as well as international approval or censure was sought and given.
Speakers: Dr Miruna Achim; Dr Hugh Glenn Cagle; Dr Fiona Clark; Dr Matthew Crawford; Dr Martha Few; Dr Marcelo Figueroa; Dr Pablo Gómez; Dr Ryan Kashanipour; Dr Adrian López-Denis; Prof. Linda Newson; Dr Mauricio Nieto; Dr Yarí Pérez Marín; Dr Andrew Redden; Dr ZebTortorici; Dr Adam warren; Keynote speaker: Prof. David Gentilcore; Discussant: Dr Paulo Drinot.
For further details, including registration, contact Dr Fiona Clark or visit our web site.
*Deadline for registration 18 October 2013*
This event has also been sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and the Society for the Social History of Medicine.