The 19th century in the history of medicine has been viewed as an era of epistemic changes brought about by the advent of the germ theory and the rise of laboratory medicine. While building upon these existing frameworks, this panel makes a historiographical intervention in our understanding of 19th-century medicine by adopting a polycentric approach, expanding the canvas of actors and institutions, ideas and practices as well as bodies and spaces associated with medicine.
This roundtable brings together four speakers who illustrate the dynamism of 19th-century medicine by reorienting our understanding of familiar themes through race medicine, psychiatry, death, and sexuality. Focusing on the use of race in 19th-century medicine, Suman Seth unpacks one of the deepest contradictions of race medicine that was based on differentiating between black and white bodies while simultaneously using black subjects to understand diseases that afflicted white bodies. Sohini Chattopadhyay highlights the significance of death and display, focusing on the prototype of vertical burial pits as a British imperial invention to conceal starvation-related famine deaths and limit expenses while reinforcing divisions of caste and community. Arnav Bhattacharya revises the Eurocentric focus of the Foucauldian argument of the medicalization of sexuality in the 19th century by revealing how disparate sites ranging from Beirut to Bombay influenced the production of sexological knowledge, the practice of sexology, and the diagnosis and treatment of sexual disorders. Through such themes, this roundtable opens up a wider cast of “experts”, social differences, locations, and practices to rethink the assumed characteristics of 19th-century medicine.
Chair email:
[email protected]Learning Outcomes- To reframe our understanding of 19th-century medicine by expanding on the set of actors, practices, institutions, and locations usually associated with major historical developments in that era.
- To unpack how historical developments in race medicine, psychiatry, sexual health, as well as the management of the dead, are relevant for medical practice today, as they overlap with core questions of social identity and bioethics in medicine.
- The roundtable directly speaks to the issue of the social determinants of medicine as well as the equitable and inclusive representation of health practitioners by highlighting how these were historically relevant concerns even in the 19th century.
