We are delighted to invite papers for our international conference ’Between Marginal and Mainstream: Negotiating Experimental Practices and Medical Knowledge’, to be held at the University of Helsinki on 11–13 March 2026.
Healing is a social practice that cuts through all social classes and categories. Sickness is a shared historical experience, and the need to explain, contain, and cure it has been prevalent in all historical societies. Conceptualisations of illness and methods of healing have, however, differed significantly in different cultures, societies, and temporal moments, as healing practices are deeply entangled with religion, social rituals, and cultural beliefs (Porter, 1997).
The question of experiment is at the core of knowledge and practices of healing. Following the so-called ‘scientific revolution’, new medical knowledge has increasingly been both gained and tested through experimentation, but development of cures through trial-and-error has a much longer and epistemologically multivalent history.
This international conference explores how different forms of experimental practices have been used to gain knowledge around healing and the human body at large both within and outside scholarly medicine. Our goal is to access and examine how experimentation has taken place and shaped knowledge around questions of health and healing roughly between the years 1600 and 1900.
Rather than being wedded to enforcing any teleological narrative of the ‘victorious progress of normal science’, we are interested in the multiplicity of perspectives, voices, and narratives which make up the history of medicine—with ‘medicine’ understood in the broadest of terms to mean elite, mainstream, scholarly, and orthodox approaches as well as folk, popular, magical, or alternative practices, leaning on the concept of medical pluralism (e.g. Jütte 2013; Hokkanen & Kananoja 2019; Ernst, 2002). In other words, we are interested in the contingent processes, manifold methods, and implicit power structures through which different forms of experimental healing practices either became a normalised and respectable part of established medicine, or were forgotten or labelled as quackery, folk medicine, superstition, or pseudoscience.
These questions have been foregrounded by researchers examining the birth of ‘normal science’ (e.g. Fara, 2003; McCalman, 2006; Porter, 1988; Stolberg 2003), as well as scholarship on the situatedness of knowledges and the myth of ‘scientific objectivity’, pointing out how normalisation of certain forms of knowledge is a social process, dependent on societies’ gendered, classed, and racialised norms (e.g. Haraway, 1988; Schiebinger, 1993). Such questions are still relevant today, perhaps now more than ever, with the rapid development of new medical technologies on the one hand, and the rise of science denialism, anti-vaxx movement, and popularity of alternative therapies on the other.
The conference is organised by the ERC-funded project ‘Medical Electricity, Embodied Experiences, and Knowledge Construction in Europe and the Atlantic World, c. 1740–1840’ (ELBOW). The project explores the way people interacted with electricity in the context of medicine, how they experienced electricity through their bodies, and how they understood and produced knowledge on electricity based on their experiences. The conference organisers are planning to edit and publish a collection of essays/a theme issue on an international journal based on selected papers from the conference.
Keynote speakers
The confirmed keynote speakers for the conference are Paola Bertucci, Lauren Kassell, and Markku Hokkanen.
Paola Bertucci is Professor in the Department of History and in the History of Science and Medicine Program at Yale University. She is the author of the prize-winning Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2017), and most recently, of In the Land of Marvels. Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), which received the 2025 Paul Bunge prize for best book on the history of scientific instruments.
Lauren Kassell is Professor of History of Science at the Department of History at the European University Institute and Professor of History of Science and Medicine at the Department of History and Philosophy, University of Cambridge (on leave). Her work focuses on everyday medicine and the occult sciences in early modern England, extends to the history of gender and generation, and encompasses digital humanities. She is General Editor of The Cambridge History of Medicine, 6 Volumes.
Markku Hokkanen is a Senior Lecturer in History at the Department of History, University of Oulu. He specializes in modern cultural, social and intellectual history of medicine and health, particularly in southern Africa and British empire. His publications include the monograph Medicine, mobility and the empire: Nyasaland networks, 1859–1960 (Manchester University Press 2017) and the co-edited collection Healers and Empires in Global History (Palgrave 2019). Hokkanen is currently co-editing a collection on healers and politics in African history, based on a Research Council of Finland-funded research project he led in 2019–23. His broader research interests cover imperial and colonial history, African history and historical methodology.
Submitting a proposal
Individual paper proposals should consist of an abstract (c. 300) words), a brief biography (up to 200 words) and full contact information. Papers should be 20 minutes in duration. We also invite proposals for full panels of 3-4 papers, with same details and a brief outline of the scope of the panel (150-250 words).
Presentations may address any geographical location but should remain roughly within the time period 1600 to 1900. Suggested topics for papers include, but are not limited to:
- Methods and concepts of examining experimental healing
- Cultural, social, and epistemological conflicts between traditional and novel healing practices
- Colonial and cross-cultural (especially non-Western) negotiations of healing practices
- Medical knowledge of marginalized communities
- Epistemologies of legitimatization of medical knowledge
- Histories and boundaries of quackery vs. ‘normal’ medicine
- Religious intersections with illness and healing
- Ontologies of medical experimentation
- Folk healing and interdisciplinary interpretations of medical experimentation
- Intersections of categories of gender, race, class, age, ability etc. in questions of health, healing, and medical knowledge
- Negotiations of professional authority, prestige, and reputation in processes of experimental healing
- Spatial and material aspects of healing and experimental medicine
- The role of embodied lay knowledge and patient experience in practices of healing
We especially welcome ideas and explorations of sources that have thus far not been extensively examined from this perspective, as well as innovative modes of presentation.
The deadline for proposals is 8th of June 2025. Proposals, as well as any inquiries and questions, should be sent to the conference email: elbow.research@helsinki.fi.
For more information about the conference and the ELBOW project, please visit our website: elbowresearch.com.
References
Bivins, Roberta, Alternative Medicine: A History (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Ernst, Waltraud, Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800–2000 (Routledge, 2002).
Fara, Patricia, ‘Marginalized Practices’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Cambridge History of Science IV (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 485–508.
Haraway, Donna, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14:3 (1988), 575–599.
Hokkanen, Markku & Kananoja, Kalle, Healers and Empires in Global History: Healing as Hybrid and Contested Knowledge (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019).
Jütte, Robert, Geschichte der alternativen Medizin: von der Volksmedizin zu den unkonventionellen Therapien von heute (Beck, 1996).
Jütte, Robert (ed.), Medical Pluralism: Past – Present – Future (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013).
McCalman, Iain, ‘Spectres of Quackery: The Fragile Career of Philippe de Loutherbourg’, Cultural & Social History 3:3 (2006), 341–54.
Porter, Roy, ‘Before the Fringe: “Quackery” and the Eighteenth-Century Medical Market’, in Roger Cooter (ed.) Studies in the History of Alternative Medicine (Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 1–27.
Schiebinger, Londa, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Beacon, 1993).
Stolberg, Michael, Homo patiens. Krankheits- und Körpererfahrung in der Frühen Neuzeit (Böhlau, 2003).
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