| Gianna Pomata, Ph.D. Institute for the History of Medicine
The Johns Hopkins University
1900 East Monument Street
Baltimore, MD 21205 Phone: 410-955-3037
e-mail: gpomata1@jhmi.edu Social and cultural history of early modern European medicine, women's and gender history, history of historical writing and scholarship, medicine and the humanities. Research: I have recently completed a volume: Oliva Sabuco, The True Medicine, Introduction, and Annotated Translation by Gianna Pomata, for the Series “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” at Chicago University Press. Oliva Sabuco’s text is one of the very few medical works published under a woman’s name in early modern Europe. Besides providing a fully annotated translation from Spanish into English, I discuss in the Introduction the controversial issue of authorship, and I locate the book in the context of early modern medicine and of the Querelle des femmes.
Projects: I am currently working on two major projects:
a) I am completing a book titled “Holy Bodies in Early Modern Medicine and Religion”, for which I was awarded a National Humanities Center Fellowship 2003-4. Using 17th and 18th-century canonization records, the book examines how the cult of the saints’ bodies faced the scrutiny of early modern medicine and natural philosophy. More generally, the book describes how new concepts and rules of evidence were developed at the intersection of early modern medicine and religion. This project builds on my previous work on the history of the concept of “fact” (see “Fatti: storie dell’evidenza empirica”, 2001) and on the cultural history of the body. b) I am also doing research for another book, to be titled “Historia Medica: the Role of Humanist Culture in the Origins of Modern Medicine”. This project investigates how early modern physicians and anatomists used the scholarly skills derived from their humanist training to develop new forms of observation and communication. The book will be divided in three parts: Historia medica (on the early modern development of the case-history), Historia anatomica (on new forms of description in anatomy in the same period) and Historia epidemica (on 17th- and 18th-century developments of Hippocratism). This project builds on previous work of mine on the category of Historia in early modern medicine (see the volume I co-edited with Nancy Siraisi, Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, 2005).
In connection with this project, I’m participating in a working group on the history of scientific observation at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. My contribution to this collective project focuses on the history of early modern medical observation.
Recent Publications:
2007: “Malpighi and the Holy Body: Medical Experts and Miraculous Evidence in Seventeenth-Century Italy”, in Renaissance Studies, 21, 4, pp. 568-586. 2005: Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, (co-editor and co-author of Introduction, with Nancy G. Siraisi). 2005: I monasteri femminili come centri di cultura fra Rinascimento e Barocco, Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura (co-editor and co-author of Introduction, with Gabriella Zarri). 2005: “Medicine for the poor: health care and poor relief in 18th and 19th- century Bologna”, in Andrew Cunningham and Ole Grell, eds., Health Care and Poor Relief in 18th and 19th century Southern Europe, Aldershot, Ashgate, pp. 229-243. 2004: “Rejoinder to Pygmalion: the origins of women’s history at the London School of Economics” in History of Historiography, 46, pp. 79-104. 2003: The Faces of Nature in Enlightenment Europe, Berlin, Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, (co-editor and co-author of Introduction, with Lorraine Daston) 2002: “Gender and the Family” in Short Oxford History of Italy: Early Modern Italy 1550-1796, ed. John Marino, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 69-86. 2002: “Knowledge-freshening Wind: Gender and the Renewal of Renaissance Studies”, in Allan Grieco and Michael Rocke, eds., The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, Florence, Olschki, pp. 173-192. 2001: “Fatti: storie dell’evidenza empirica“ Quaderni Storici, 108, 3, 2001 (co-editor and co-author of Introduction with Simona Cerutti). 2001:“A Christian Utopia of the Renaissance: Elena Duglioli’s Spiritual and Physical Motherhood (ca. 1510-1520) in Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich: Europäisce Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500-1850), ed. Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans Medick, Patrice Veit, Köln, Böhlau Verlag, pp. 323-353. 2001: “Menstruating Men: Similarity and Difference of the Sexes in Early Modern Medicine” in Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee, eds., Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, Durham and London, Duke Univ. Press, pp. 109-152. 1998: Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers, and the Law in Early Modern Bologna, Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins U.P. (English Translation of La promessa di guarigione: malati e curatori in antico regime, Bologna, secoli XVI-XVIII, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1994.) Graduate Section. Course syllabi: - HST 140.105 History of Medicine: Antiquity to the Scientific Revolution
- 150. 701: History of Medicine: Antiquity to the Scientific Revolution |  |
