Seminars

In early modern Europe there was a wide array of drinks, powders, and poultices that were supposed to prevent miscarriage. Recipes for these miscarriage preventives can be found in printed books, in Latin as well as vernacular, as well as in manuscript family recipe books. Although miscarriage is a condition that we recognize today, it is not one we think of as curable. By modern estimates, about a quarter of pregnancies end in miscarriage. The aim of treatment is usually to make the miscarriage as safe and pain free as possible, not to stop it from happening. Given that we in the twenty-first century no longer believe that it is medically possible to stop most miscarriages, it is natural to ask why early modern people, both physicians and lay men and women, were so convinced that they could. My contention is that the ingredients in miscarriage remedies were richly resonant substances, with multiple layers of meaning. Only by teasing out these layers of meaning can we hope to understand why early modern people believed these remedies were efficacious. The ingredients used in these recipes are global, ranging from herbs grown in family gardens to plant, mineral, and animal substances imported from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In the early modern period, diverse theories of the body, health, and disease coexisted: humoral medicine, rooted in Greek, Latin and Arabic texts; chymical medicine, derived from the writings of Paracelsus and his followers; and natural magic, a tradition with ancient roots given new intellectual weight in the early modern period by Giambattista della Porta and others. The efficacy of various ingredients could be explained differently, depending on which of these competing theories the patient or practitioner espoused. And many ingredients had potent symbolic and religious associations that are not easily disentangled from their medicinal virtues. Finally, some of the substances used in miscarriage remedies were valuable commodities, with economic and political meanings that shaped their use.

The Cruz-Badiano Codex, which transmits Nahua medicinal recipes translated into Latin, was compiled in 1552 by Indigenous scholars of the College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, among them the physician Martín de la Cruz and the translator Juan Badiano. It is decorated with 184 vivid illustrations of curative plants that have inspired works by artist Blanka Amezkua. The conversation will consider Amezkua's works.

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.