CfP-Rewrite Conflicts: The Role of Losers, Heretics, and Outsiders in the History of Medicine

Due dates for submission: December 15, 2017
Lenght: 8000 words


CFP: A multifaceted narration characterizes the contrapositions between schools, factions, theories, and practices in the history of medicine. Yet, studying these conflicts helps to shed light on those actorstraditional historiographies usually relegate to secondary roles: surgeons, practitioners, apothecaries,botanists, astronomers, chymists, men and women devoted to the knowledge of simples. Especially when following losers, outsiders, heretics, and marginalized scholars, medical conflicts revealepistemologically fruitful paths that help to track the changes buttressing early modern bio-medicalrevolution. While academic physicians required the support of theologians to rule out these practices asresponsible for heresies, errors, and charlatanisms, kings frequently credited such outsiders as courtphysicians (i.e., Ambroise Paré, Guy de La Brosse), elevating their knowledge and experience to acrucial role. Slowly, these actors entered medical schools and academies, rewriting early modern historyof medicine. This fascicule aims to reconstruct this conflicting situation, and to analyse diverse cases of suchoutsiders and losers, moving from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries (wider focuses are acceptedas well). Research articles coming from different fields (history of philosophy, psychology, science,medicine, botany, ideas, intellectual history, and history of life sciences …) are welcome.