The Material Turn in the History of Life Science

Abstract

The “material turn” or the history of things has become a prominent focus in the history of life science of the long eighteenth century. The reassessment of eighteenth‐century science since the 1990s has given particular prominence to medicine and the life sciences. Eighteenth‐century anatomists and naturalists studied, collected, imitated, and represented many kinds of natural things, from the human body to trees. This article considers a variety of new approaches to material culture, museums, and collecting among historians of science since 2000, focusing on natural history and anatomy. The historiography of objects invokes a sensory history of seeing and touching, and a global history of movement across time, place, and culture.

Sticky models

“…Historians of the body and of biomedicine have, in general, been slow to unify material histories with observations drawn from contemporary contexts (for the historiography of the material history of biomedicine, see: Clever and Ruberg 2014;Schouwenburg 2015;Guerrini 2016). The discursive approach found in many cultural histories of the material world assumes that objects can be read as texts, as vessels of human culture, in order to explain the intellectual environment in which they were constructed and consumed.…”

Publishing virtue: Medical entrepreneurship and reputation in the Republic of Letters

“…For recent exceptions, see especially DiMeo (2017); Keller (2012). On the "global" and "material" turns, see, among others, Roberts (2012); Raj (2010a); McCook (2013); Hicks (2010); Guerrini (2016); Klein & Spary (2010); Bennett & Joyce (2010); Finnegan (2008); Secord (2004). 4 To offer just a few examples: Rankin (2017); Pugliano (2017); Biagioli (2009); P. Smith (2018).…”