CfP: Between Marginal and Mainstream: Negotiating Experimental Practices and Medical Knowledge, 1600–1900
We are delighted to invite papers for the international conference Between Marginal and Mainstream: Negotiating Experimental Practices and Medical Knowledge, to be held at the University of Helsinki on 11–13 March 2026.
The question of experiment is at the core of knowledge and practices of healing. Following the so-called ‘scientific revolution’, new medical knowledge has increasingly been both gained and tested through experimentation, but development of cures through trial-and-error has a much longer, transnational, and epistemologically multivalent history.
This conference explores how different forms of experimental practices have been used to gain knowledge around healing and the human body at large in different historical societies both within and outside scholarly medicine. Our goal is to access and examine how experimentation has taken place and shaped knowledge around questions of health and healing roughly between the years 1600 and 1900.
Rather than being wedded to enforcing any teleological narrative of the ‘victorious progress of normal science’, we are interested in the multiplicity of perspectives, voices, and narratives which make up the history of medicine—with ‘medicine’ understood in the broadest of terms to mean elite, mainstream, scholarly, and orthodox approaches as well as folk, popular, magical, or alternative practices.
These questions have been foregrounded by researchers examining the birth of ‘normal science’, as well as scholarship on the situatedness of knowledges. Such questions are still relevant today, perhaps now more than ever, with the rapid development of new medical technologies on the one hand, and the rise of science denialism, anti-vaxx movement, and popularity of alternative therapies on the other.
Keynote speakers
We are thrilled to confirm that the keynote speakers for the conference will be Paola Bertucci (Yale), Lauren Kassell (Cambridge/EUI), and Markku Hokkanen (Oulu).
Submitting a proposal
Individual paper proposals should consist of an abstract (c. 300) words), a brief biography (up to 200 words) and full contact information. Papers should be 20 minutes in duration. We also invite proposals for full panels of 3-4 papers, with same details and a brief outline of the scope of the panel (150-250 words).
Presentations may address any geographical location but should remain roughly within the time period 1600 to 1900. Suggested topics for papers include, but are not limited to:
- Methods and concepts of examining experimental healing
- Cultural, social, and epistemological conflicts between traditional and novel healing practices
- Colonial and cross-cultural (especially non-Western) negotiations of healing practices
- Medical knowledge of marginalised communities
- Epistemologies of legitimatisation of medical knowledge
- Histories and boundaries of quackery vs. ‘normal’ medicine
- Religious intersections with illness and healing
- Ontologies of medical experimentation
- Folk healing and interdisciplinary interpretations of medical experimentation
- Intersections of categories of gender, race, class, age, ability etc. in questions of health, healing, and medical knowledge
- Negotiations of professional authority, prestige, and reputation in processes of experimental healing
- Spatial and material aspects of healing and experimental medicine
- The role of embodied lay knowledge and patient experience in practices of healing
The deadline for proposals is 8th of June 2025. Proposals, as well as any inquiries and questions, should be sent to the conference email: elbow.research@helsinki.fi.
Organisers
The conference is organised by the ERC-funded project ‘Medical Electricity, Embodied Experiences, and Knowledge Construction in Europe and the Atlantic World, c. 1740–1840’ (ELBOW). The project explores the way people interacted with electricity in the context of medicine, how they experienced electricity through their bodies, and how they understood and produced knowledge on electricity based on their experiences.
For more information about the conference and the ELBOW project, please visit our website: elbowresearch.com.