Invitation inaugural lecture Rina Knoeff for the Sarton Chair for History of Science 2024-25

On Thursday, October 17, at 4 p.m. Rina Knoeff will deliver her inaugural lecture Medicine and the Female Body: A Historical Consultation, for the Sarton Chair for History of Science 2024-25 at the Ghent University Museum (GUM). The lecture will be followed by a reception.

Medicine and the Female Body: A Historical Consultation
A recurring theme in explaining the origins of today’s gender health gap is an alleged tradition of patriarchal and misogynist attitudes toward women. Yet, we seem to have forgotten that the discipline of medicine also contains a tradition that valued the female body as both the most natural site of perfect health and paradoxically, as the seat of the most horrible diseases. The latter inspired gender-specific therapies, which we seem to lack today. Knoeff will ask how this more positive premodern approach to the female body can inspire gendered healthcare today.

A second lecture will be given by Rina Knoeff, as Sarton Medal holder, on Friday, October 18, at 5 p.m.: The epidemic constitution: Body, environment, and the idea of contagion at the Campus Ghent University Hospital. The lecture will be followed by a reception.

The epidemic constitution: Body, environment, and the idea of contagion
Since the nineteenth-century introduction of the laboratory in medicine, single individual pathogens have identified infectious diseases. Thus, plague is caused by Yersina pestis, cholera by vibrio cholerae and flu by an influenza virus. This raises the question of how contagion was understood in the premodern period, before the discovery of bacteria and viruses. With the example of early modern fevers, Knoeff will show that the idea of contagion reflected complicated interactions between the material qualities of poisonous particles, environmental conditions and moral meanings.

For more information on these lectures and how to register, visit this website.