ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Itinerancy was a key component of surgical education in early modern Europe. Journeymen travelled from town to town and across battlefields to gain experience beyond their apprenticeship training. European exploration and expansion transformed these itineraries and made surgeons a part of the colonial operation. This panel queries the role of itinerancy in surgical knowledge and practice and examines how the expanded geographical purview impacted epistemologies of medicine and the body. Alisha Rankin begins with a paper on the German specialist surgeon Georg Bartisch, who chose to remain itinerant even when he had other options and was a vocal proponent of the benefits of itinerancy. Tara Alberts then queries how the desire for knowledge and profit led seventeenth-century European surgeons to travel to colonial holdings, and how travel reshaped surgeons’ embodied knowledge and practice. Wenrui Zhao focuses on Dutch surgeon Willmen ten Rhijne’s encounters with acupuncture during his travels in Southeast Asia and how he assimilated the new techniques into his epistemology of the body. Finally, through examining the notebook of a seventeenth-century English practitioner, Elaine Leong investigates how these new far-flung travels required surgeons to gain new skills and knowledge beyond medicine.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Pablo F. Gómez, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Individual Presentations

• Closing wounds and opening doors: surgical skills and the desire to travel in the seventeenth century - Tara Alberts, York University

• The needle and the skin: Willem ten Rhijne and surgical encounters between Europe and Asia - Wenrui Zhao, University of Utah

• A Vade Mecum for Travel: Surgery and Itinerancy in Early Modern Britain - Elaine Leong, University College London

Session Organizer

• Alisha Rankin, Tufts University