Health

Le chirurgien nègre by Jean-Baptiste Debret (1834)

In the early modern period, illness and health challenged the boundaries of public concern and private life. Treating disease at an individual level demanded knowing intimate information, but rules of confidentiality had to be negotiated case-by-case and between opposing social pressures. At the same time, epidemics made people’s bodies a matter of public scrutiny.

 

How did privacy shape what we understand as health? The HEALTH theme investigates this question through an examination of how people dealt with illnesses and different forms of healing from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Following the entanglements of privacy with history of science and knowledge, the theme will focus on how strategies of privacy intertwined with the pursuit of knowledge and how the search for healing knowledge also demanded the infringement upon the privacy of others. We are particularly interested in the impact of colonialism on how health was defined, promoted, and restored. As such, the theme intersects also with colonial and maritime history. Moreover, the HEALTH theme deals with privacy negotiated at the thresholds between human and non-human animals and diverse ecosystems. In general, the theme focuses on historical agents that are action subjects in the production of healing knowledge, but also those that were subjected to these knowledge pursuits, particularly in regard to what role privacy played in enabling or disabling their agency. The team also aims to incorporate – but also question – methods of computational history to understand the complex relationship between privacy and health in a long-term perspective.

 

Profile articles

Klein Käfer, Natacha, and Natália Da Silva Perez, eds. Women’s Private Practices of Knowledge Production in Early Modern Europe. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2024.

Klein Käfer, Natacha, ed. Privacy at Sea: Practices, Spaces, and Communication in Maritime History. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

Perez, Natália da Silva, and Natacha Klein Käfer. ‘Between Concealment and Disclosure: Approaches to the History of Privacy in Knowledge-Making’. KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 7, no. 1 (March 2023): 1–9.
Klein Käfer, Natacha. “Dynamics of Healer-Patient Confidentiality in Early Modern Witch Trials”. Green, Michaël, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, and Mette Birkedal Bruun, eds. Early Modern Privacy: Sources and Approaches. Leiden: Brill, 2021.

 

 

Partner projects

Privacy Black & White; Historical Notions of Privacy in Latin America. Read more here.