ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Closing wounds and opening doors: surgical skills and the desire to travel in the seventeenth century

• In Event: European Surgeons Across the Early Modern World: Itineracy, Knowledge, and Practice

English Abstract

Increasing long-distance trade in the early modern period created a range of new opportunities for medical experts. Expanding port cities offered new markets for remedies, treatments, and knowhow. Encounter and exchange created opportunities to learn potentially popular and lucrative therapies from other practitioners. For early modern Europeans enchanted by the allure of distant lands described in travel narratives, skill in surgery could be a ticket to travel. This paper analyses the accounts of four surgeons who travelled from Europe to Southeast Asia in the seventeenth century. Each leveraged their surgical skills in different ways: using opportunities provided by the Dutch, French, and English East India Companies, missionary orders, colonial authorities, royal courts, and local populations to make a living, and to travel as much as possible. Travel often required that they adapt and refine their treatments as they encountered varied situations, diseases, climates and bodies. Their accounts document their encounters with unfamiliar medical practices, understandings of the body and approaches to cure. Through the lens of accounts like these, I will examine how travel could re-shape surgical knowledge and skills, and the men who wielded them.

Author

• Tara Alberts, York University