Seminars

This talk reinterprets Bernardino Ramazzini's De Morbis Artificum Diatriba (On the Diseases of Workers, 1700), often credited as the first treatise on occupational medicine. I situate it between learned social satire on artisans, neo-Hippocratic environmental medicine, and an emerging European project to preserve population health as an instrument of statecraft.

The rapid transformation of nature in the early modern Spanish empire worried observers. As now-extinct zebros disappeared from the plains of Iberia, colonists in New Spain warned European readers about the haunting cry of the tlacuatzin, an unsightly animal that played dead, carried her babies on her back, and whose tail held medical powers. This talk uses new methods of juxtapositional reading of the Relaciones geográficas and topográficas (surveys of the Americas and Iberia, respectively) to reveal early modern environments that underwent a patchwork transformation, rendering some areas of both eerily uniform whilst nearby natures remained incomparable.

My point of departure in this talk is a “superstitious and suspicious” object confiscated from a group of women in a Saxon mining town by local authorities in 1696. The subsequent investigation revealed the many hands that had a role in fashioning, using, and interpreting this object and invites us today to examine a material culture of magic, money, and embodiment in early modern Saxony. The fact that the object still sits in the Dresden archive today, meanwhile, offers an opportunity to reflect on the power and slipperiness of archival objects in historical research.