CfP: Health and Nature. Special issue of the journal "Histoire, médecine et santé"

This thematic issue of the journal Histoire, médecine et santé examines the various uses of and relations to nature in the field of health. The historically and culturally situated concept of “nature” can of course take on several meanings and be subject to debate. Regarding its relationship to health, the many “natural” medicine currents that emerged in Europe from the last third of the nineteenth century spontaneously come to mind. Through their practices, these currents have sought to oppose a form of medicine deemed increasingly artificial and chemical, particularly as a result of the industrialisation of drug production. Nevertheless, in the wake of calls to “put an end to parallel medicine” (Guillemain, Faure, 2019), this issue neither seeks to restrict itself to the margins of medicine, nor to disconnect their history from more general scientific and cultural movements. While paying renewed attention to these margins, it thus adopts a broad definition of “nature”, encompassing all medical practices that mobilise the material reality which surrounds and shapes the human species – in the form of soil, air, water and other living species – with a view to maintaining or restoring health.

Inspired by the multidisciplinary issues raised by the current climate and biodiversity crises, this thematic issue follows recent academic initiatives in interrogating the various conceptions of nature and their effects in a number of cultural fields (urban planning, artistic production, etc.). It seeks to explore the ways in which these representations, rooted in both ontologies and marketing issues, constrain and transform the medical uses of natural elements and spaces. The issue is open to proposals from a wide range of historical and geographical contexts that could help broaden our understanding of the naturalness of the elements and products in question. Contributions focused on European biomedicine are also encouraged: beyond the “Great divide” that associates biomedicine with artificiality and emancipation from nature, recent studies focusing on the materiality of practices have shown how crucial the use of natural elements is to biomedical practices in the broadest sense, including in their industrial form – from bacterial cultures to the screening of plant and marine substances for the production of synthetic medicines.

What do the use of plants, the attention paid to the richness of cultivated soils, or yet the vital qualities attributed to water and clay baths tell us about the cultural, social and economic contexts in which this knowledge was produced? From the colonisation of “knowledge materials” (Boumediene, 2016) in the modern era to the rise of naturopathy in the second half of the twentieth century, which kinds of therapeutic alliances between natural elements and sick bodies are forged through individual and collective experiences? In order to study the intellectual, productive and commercial relationships with nature in the field of health, beyond the heterogeneous contexts in which they developed, the structure of this issue will be based on the material elements making up this non-human natural environment (plants, water, earth, fungi, minerals, etc.) on which each contribution focuses. We invite authors to submit proposals for articles investigating one or several of the following points from this material perspective:

• How are natural elements or spaces mobilized, activated or called upon in care practices?
• How is their agency understood, in which kinds of cosmologies are they embedded, and how do conceptions of the efficacy of a natural therapeutic agent influence the ways in which that agent is prepared (and vice versa)?
• From preparation to curing, what are the different stages (scientific, legal, commercial) that make a practice or therapeutic agent “natural”? What do they reveal about the power dynamics and negotiations between the epistemic or professional communities that interact around these frontier objects? (Think, for example, of the definitional issues surrounding “drugs”, “cosmetics” or “food supplements”).
• How should historiographies of nature and its materiality be established? Methodological reflection, for instance on the use of biographies tracing the trajectory of natural therapeutic agents, are welcome.

Timeline:

• Deadline for proposal submissions (maximum two pages): 15 February 2024.
• Replies to authors: early March 2024.
• Submission of the final article for accepted proposals: December 2024. After the proposal selection process, the articles submitted to HMS will undergo a double-blind peer review.
• Proposals may also be submitted under any of the journal’s headings and may include interviews, sources and documents, or research notebooks.
• Publication planned in HMS 29, Summer 2026.

Editorial languages: French, English or Spanish.

Editorial guidelines on the HMS website.

Contact Information:  Léo Bernard, Matti Leprêtre and Céline Pessis