CALL FOR PAPERS

 

Humanism and Medicine in the Early Modern Era

 

Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Western Australia,

Perth, 22-23 September 2006

 

The symposium will explore the complex, and sometimes troubled, relationship between humanism and medicine from the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries. The father of humanism, Francesco Petrarca, famously attacked the medical profession in Against the Doctors (1352). Humanism spoke a new language – theoretically a natural, classical Latin, as opposed to the ‘barbaric’ scholastic idiom of the philosophers and the Galenist gobbledygook of the doctors. But the cultures of humanism and medicine inevitably enriched one another: doctors and humanists shared a professional interest in the ancient texts (from Dioscorides to Lucretius), and a vested interest in preserving Latin as a professional argot. Humanism had its own healing pretensions through poetry and moral philosophy. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, doctor and humanist sometimes co-existed in the same person such as Girolamo Fracastoro, Girolamo Cardano, Julius Caesar Scaliger, François Rabelais, and Pierre Petit.

The symposium’s keynote speakers include Professor Ian Maclean (All Souls College, Oxford) and Professor Vivian Nutton (Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College, London).

Papers (30 minutes) should consider various aspects of this broad theme, including but not limited to the interface between learned and non-learned medicine, vernacular humanism and medicine, the evolution of the identity of the humanist physician over the early modern era, and the extent to which a consciousness of ‘two cultures’ prevailed in different local and institutional contexts.

 

Please send a 300-word abstract before 1 December 2005 to the conference organisers A/Professor Yasmin Haskell and Dr Susan Broomhall at broomhal@cyllene.uwa.edu.au.

 

(We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council Network for Early European Research, and the Cassamarca Foundation.)