ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Seeing Health: Representing Medical Knowledge in Early Modern period

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Seeing Health examines how medical knowledge was made visible, intelligible, and authoritative across early modern and modern Europe. By merging visual culture, textual practices, and medical culture from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, this panel investigates not only what was shown, but why and to whom—and how representational choices shaped the possibilities and limits of medical understanding.
The first paper (Tripepi) focuses on the long visual tradition through which health, plants, and bodies were represented. In fact, Tripepi moves to the seventeenth century to analyse Jesuit works such as Flora Sinensis, showing how visual strategies crafted between China and Europe blended scientific description with cultural politics, transforming images into tools of persuasion, exoticisation, and identity-building.
The second pair of papers shift the perspective from the representation of nature to the representation of medical theory and practice in moments of epistemic transition. Di Tommaso examines the tension between experimental discovery and clinical conservatism in Francesco Redi’s approach to the acarine theory of scabies, revealing how literary style, courtly persona, and therapeutic caution complicated the adoption of new pathological frameworks. Magro closes the session by analysing Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti’s tabulated journals of smallpox inoculation (1756), showing how paper technologies, grids, and standardized observational categories made early public-health experiments legible, comparable, and politically actionable.
Taken together, these three contributions demonstrate that “seeing health” was never a neutral act: from iconography to Enlightenment culture, from Jesuit engravings to courtly correspondence, the visualisation of disease and cure was always embedded in broader regimes of authority, belief, and institutional practice. By juxtaposing visual traditions and theoretical transformations, the panel highlights the multiple ways in which medical knowledge was shaped, constrained, and reimagined through practices of representation.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Maria Conforti, Università di Roma

Individual Presentations

• The Society’s Eye: Representation, Reception, and Propaganda in Jesuit Works of Medicine and Botany in China - Alessandro Tripepi

• On the Surface of Paradox: supporting experimental discovery and resisting clinical innovation in Redi medical and experimental practices. - Noemi Di Tommaso, Università degli Studi di Milano

• Tabulating Medical Knowledge: Paper Technologies and Inoculation Experiments in Targioni Tozzetti's Journals (1756) - Gianluca Magro

Session Organizer

• Noemi Di Tommaso, Università degli Studi di Milano