Seminars

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.

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.