BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MEDICINE AS A HUMANISTIC INTERDISCIPLINE

The health humanities seek to establish a dialogue between the humanities and the health sciences, yet this dialogue typically has emerged from the perspective of the 20th and 21st centuries. In (re)turning to the 18th century, Professor Hilger’s book project, Bodies of Knowledge, questions this presentism by demonstrating how medicine functioned as an interdiscipline that, in its investigation of the human body, simultaneously drew on areas that are now labeled as either scientific or humanistic.

By discussing physician-writers, the role of women as producers and objects of medical knowledge, and the centrality of the bodies of racial others in 18th-century medicine, the book engages theories of embodiment and the intersectional identities of sex, race, and ability. It investigates how 18th-century debates not only theorized these identities but actually created them and thereby established a vocabulary that shapes medical discourse to the present day.

In (re)turning to the 18th century, Bodies of Knowledge seeks to denaturalize and challenge the present-day separation between the “hard” sciences and the “soft” humanities by recovering the interdisciplinary nature of 18th-century debates about the body. By demonstrating how, in the 18th century, medicine functioned as an interdiscipline that simultaneously drew on areas that are currently bifurcated as either scientific or humanistic, this book will provide a model for how to transcend disciplinary silos in the present day and to recenter humanistic study as the heart of intellectual inquiry.