Tue Sep 26, 2017

Tue Oct 3, 2017

Tue Oct 10, 2017

Thu Nov 30, 2017

Peter Distelzweig- HPS Colloquium Speaker Series

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Location: TBA

Climbing the Tree of Philosophy? Physics, Medicine, and Morality in The Passions of the Soul

 

In this paper I aim to identify, disentangle, and relate physical, medical, and moral perspectives on the role of the passions in human life. In one of the prefatory letters to the The Passions of the Soul, Descartes’ “physics” (which includes the study of plants, animals, and humans) is presented as especially relevant to medicine—one of the three principal “branches” of philosophy that sprout from its “trunk” (physics), to employ Descartes’ image of the Tree of Philosophy (also referenced in the prefatory letters of Passions

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Thu Dec 7, 2017

Hannah Marcus-HPS Colloquium Speaker Series

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Location: TBA

“Censoring Medicine: Processes of Expurgation, Forgetting, and Remembering in Early Modern Italy”

 

The Roman Index of Prohibited Books (1559) not only banned the works of theologians like Luther and Melanchthon; it also made it illegal for scholars in Italy to read many works of medicine written and published in Northern Europe. While some of these books were burned, many others were expurgated, or selectively censored. This talk examines copies of expurgated medical books to reveal that Catholic authorities understood the printed book as both an intellectual threat and also a physical object that could be manipulated and regulated. By combining historical and bibliographical approaches, I delve into the medical books themselves as a lost archive documenting the practice of censorship. Close examination of censored objects reveals book expurgation as a process of memory damnation. This damnatio memoriae…