Protestant attacks against papal corruption of the cult of saints and falsification of miracles led the Post-Tridentine Church to reform the processes of saint-making through an intensified collaboration with medical science. The alignment of faith and science at the nexus of the human body culminated in the eighteenth century under Benedict XIV Lambertini (r. 1740–58). Benedict published a monumental treatise, still influential today, that codified canonization proceedings on the basis of modern medical expertise, and he was a preeminent patron of scientific and medical institutions and practitioners for the advancement of medical knowledge and public health. The imperatives of the Counter-Reformation, canon law, experimental science and medicine, and the burgeoning Enlightenment coalesced, albeit uneasily, in his vision of a reformed Church, for which natural and saintly bodies became primary emblems in defense of the authority of the Catholic Church in a world increasingly resistant to it.

This chapter examines the relationship between medicine and the papacy in the Middle Ages. It considers the historiographical debate amongst historians regarding whether popes were primarily adversaries to or advocates of the study and evolution of medicine. Focusing on the Avignon popes and their courts, it suggests that these individuals and their spaces increasingly became cultural centres for the production, transmission, and consumption of medical ideas and practices throughout the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. With the rise of medicine as a profession – and the sociocultural value this process bestowed on its practice – a pope’s patronage of medical activities granted prestige both to his court and to his beneficiaries.

Vitruvius’ De architectura (c. 35–23 BCE) offers an ideal lens through which to view the emergence of the Imperial artes. In the introduction to his work, Vitruvius develops an elaborate theory of architectural knowledge that connects the discipline with other branches of specialized knowledge and gives pride of place to causal explanations of architectural method via natural first principles. Vitruvius’ theory is tailored to architecture but is of wider importance in that it establishes a general notion of ars predicated on the scientific premises sketched in Chapter 2. True to his expansive conception of the discipline, throughout his treatise Vitruvius carefully explains his methods in terms of natural first principles, demonstrating their fundamental soundness. His advice for orienting city streets and walls (Book I) and for choosing building materials (Book II) exemplifies his characteristic interest in connecting architecture with a broader understanding of nature.

Of Celsus’ Artes (early first century AD), which originally handled agriculture, medicine, the art of war, rhetoric, and philosophy, only the eight books on medicine survive. Celsus’ work attests to the vibrant interdisciplinary culture of the early Imperial artes. The books De medicina in particular reveal a distinctive conceptualization of specialized knowledge that bears the hallmarks of the scientific culture of the artes but contrasts sharply with the approaches of Vitruvius and Columella. Celsus’ theory of the medical ars self-consciously appropriates but also develops and expands key methodological terms from the Greek medical tradition, including reason, experience, cause, and nature. These terms set the parameters for Celsus’ exposition of medicine, as exemplified in discussions of bloodletting, fevers, and fractures. Celsus’ more reserved attitude toward the kind of knowledge of nature required for expertise does not ignore the central preoccupations of the scientific culture of the artes, but instead pragmatically inflects them for medical practice.

In what would turn out to be the twilight decades of early modern Edo, cracks appeared in the foundations of its society and politics. Scholars of Western medicine discovered that the Chinese philosophical ideas that underpinned not just scientific understanding but also morality and the political order could be wrong. The appearance of American warships at the mouth of Edo Bay in 1853 challenged the government and culminated in the signing of humiliating treaties with foreign powers, exacerbating concerns about the shogunate’s ability to govern. And two years later, the fierce Ansei earthquake depleted government coffers, further demonstrated the limits of shogunate power, and fueled popular desires for world renewal. After the Tokugawa regime was toppled in 1868, bringing an end to the early modern order and the very notion of a shogunate, Edo was renamed Tokyo and strategically remade into the capital of an emergent modern nation.

Through a case study of the ‘speaking machine’ constructed by doctor-poet Erasmus Darwin between 1770 and 1771, this chapter aims to demonstrate that Romantic-era projects on the mechanics of speech were both new and controversial in their potential to undermine the religious, political, and philosophical status quo. It explores how Darwin’s simultaneous investigations of anatomy and machinery are suggestive of a materialist approach to the human, and particularly the speaking, body and how his materialist model of speech production simultaneously allows and is allowed by Darwin’s dual identity as philosopher and physician which informs the interdisciplinarity of his thought and practice. The chapter concludes by making the case that Darwin’s multidisciplinary approach to speech underpins both politicised reactions to his work and his own account of the role that a materialist understanding of speech and the voice can play in the development and improvement of society.

Travis Chi Wing Lau addresses the place of race within Romantic-era medical discourse, calling attention to the disabling forms of experimentation on Black bodies that enabled anatomical research. There is, Lau points out, a key irony in these experiments, as the study of those who were understood to be fundamentally pathological led to universalizing conclusions about the nature of normative, white man. If this sounds like a moment of merely historical interest, Lau assures us it is not. Rather, the legacy of the racialized discourse of medicine can be witnessed in ongoing health disparities among differently racialized groups.

In the twentieth century, settler states have operated through science. At the same time, the field of American bioethics has safeguarded the moral authority of science. It has done so by upholding the settler logics of the sciences that it claimed to hold to account. This chapter explores how the imperial logic of American bioethics works – through its concepts, practices, and imperceptions. To do so, the chapter follows Carolyn Matthews, an everyday American with a rich “vernacular archive” and apt work experiences, across three medical sites and over three postwar decades. It tells Carolyn’s story in two registers – setting Carolyn’s work experience prior to 1974, when the US Congress passed laws for the treatment of human subjects, alongside Carolyn’s moral recounting of those work experiences in the late 1970s. Carolyn’s case offers insight into how the vocabulary and framework of modern American bioethics embeds a moral ontology organized around civic individualism and its safeguarding, as opposed to anticolonialism and its dismantling. The aim of this critique of bioethics through the Americas is to strengthen existing alliances for justice-based science and to inform anticolonial practices – in science, history, and transformative bioethics.

Chapter 2 explores accounts by Civil War nurses and surgeons – first-person nonfiction, lightly fictionalized narrative, sensationalized memoir, and fiction. The central texts in this chapter are Walt Whitman’s Memoranda after the War, Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, John Brinton’s Personal Memoirs, Susie King Taylor’s Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, and S. Weir Mitchell’s “The Case of George Dedlow.” These narrators represent amputation in different ways, especially the scene of amputation itself, the image of a basket or trough of dismembered limbs, and amputee reflections on the relationship between their remaining bodies and their absent limbs. However, for all the narrators in these texts, amputation is part of a meditation on the meanings of intact and amputated bodies, and their role in making sense of the Civil War. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Army Medical Museum, in which amputated limbs were catalogued, stored, and displayed as examples of the damage done by gunshots and shells. This dovetails with a reading of George Dedlow, in which the protagonist’s legs, stored in alcohol at the Museum, return to him briefly during a séance, absurdly marrying hopes for bodily resurrection with spiritualism’s belief in a humanized heaven.

Ensuring the future of France – its children – meant fighting on multiple dimensions. One set of enemies included infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis and the influenza pandemic; the other set comprises illnesses and infant mortality attendant to poverty and malnutrition. Thousands of volunteers from the United States fought these battles with treatment and prevention strategies. They toured the Franco-American colonies, organized large antiepidemic campaigns, and produced leaflets providing practical advice on managing the care of babies and children during wartime. With the help of the Children’s Bureau of the American Red Cross, the American Commission for the Prevention of Tuberculosis in France, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division, thousands of leaflets were distributed to the Franco-American colonies of the CFAPCF, fatherless children supported through the FCFS, as well as to schools and mothers across France. With the spread of tuberculosis in 1917 and the 1918 influenza pandemic, American medical experts realized that a sanitary ironclad was needed to block the spread of contagious diseases to the United States: to protect France was to protect the United States.

This chapter provides an overview of how various aspects of sexuality are dealt with in different Islamic traditions. If first looks at the Qur'an, the Sunna and pre-modern Islamic legal sources. It then focuses on how some medical and erotological sources dealt with the issue in the past, and finally looks at how contemporary feminists are pushing back against patriarchal interpretations of Islamic traditions. The chapter argues that pre-modern texts can help explain how sexuality is understood in contemporary Muslim-majority societies, where continuities are as striking as ruptures, especially when coming to religious or legal sources. It also reminds us of the danger of essentialism, oversimplification and lack of historical contextualization when looking at Islamic and religious traditions in general.

This chapter examines the relationship between Black literature and anti-Black medical violence. It argues that, since at least the eighteenth century, Black writers have tapped into the narrative and documentary power of Black writing to chronicle and archive the racialized operations of medical violence and its historical attempts to exploit Black bodies. Using literature to spotlight medicine’s role in the global economies of Black embodied terror, these writers have helped to construct an important site of memory that I call the Black medical archive. In doing so, they demonstrate the importance of medicine to the politics and aesthetics of the Black literary tradition, from its origins to the present. Further, they unfurl how Black literature has long been a crucial site for the transformational practices of storytelling that the field of narrative medicine has proffered as a radical intervention into the histories of violence, exploitation, and discrepant care that have informed the practices and epistemologies of modern medicine.