ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Minerality of the Body: Bladder Stones in Early Modern Visual and Experimental Culture

• In Event: New Insights in Early Modern Science: Knowledge Production

English Abstract

In early modern Europe, bladder stones (urinary calculi) posed a persistent conceptual problem: were they products of bodily corruption, spontaneous generation, or a form of internal mineral formation? Removed from the body through surgical intervention, these objects circulated widely as medical specimens and objects of curiosity, appearing in case histories, anatomical collections, cabinets of natural history, and, in some instances, mineralogical catalogues. Their ambiguous status unsettled established distinctions between organic and inorganic matter, and between pathology and natural process.
This paper examines bladder stones as visual and experimental objects through which early modern practitioners negotiated the question of minerality in the human body. Drawing on surgical treatises, correspondence, early microscopic observations, and preserved specimens, I focus on the ways stones were examined, described, and represented: they were sliced open, engraved, measured, compared to geological materials, subjected to chemical tests, and depicted in printed images. Attention to surface, texture, internal structure, colour, and stratification shaped both diagnostic and philosophical interpretations of their origin.
By tracing how bladder stones were made visible and legible through emerging experimental and representational practices, this paper considers their representation in relation to the development of early modern theories of matter. Positioned uneasily between the fleshy body and the mineral earth, such stones forced physicians and natural philosophers to reckon with the possibility that the human body was not only a site of organic life, but also generative of mineral-like processes.

Author

• Pamela Mackenzie, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science