Title: Professor Emerita, English
University: Temple University
Email: suewells@temple.edu
Twitter: N/A
Website: N/A
Description of Work:
I have written two projects focusing on gender and medical writing—Our of the Dead House, an account of the writing practices of nineteenth century women physicians, and Our Bodies Ourselves and the Work of Writing, an analysis of the writing practices of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. I am currently working on a The Anatomy of Melancholy and Early Modern Practices of Knowledge, a book that will place The Anatomy in the context of early modern learning at the cusp of the emergence of new sciences, with special emphasis on medicine.
Symposium Submission:
Early Modern Translingual Medicine
Contemporary sociolinguistics, confronting the spread of many Englishes, has developed a theory of translinguality to trace the mutual influences among languages as speakers encounter them in a global setting. Such confrontations are not new; they happen and they did happen in both everyday life and in specialized practices such as medicine. This paper will explore the relations among Latin and vernaculars in early modern medicine, focusing on academic medicine in England at the middle of the seventeenth century.
Medicine, along with law and divinity, was among the three professions for which universities offered training. Students began to study medicine after a thorough arts training which would have included rhetoric, literature, and philosophy–especially natural philosophy, which was considered to be the scientific foundation of medicine. In all these fields, the curriculum was based on Latin texts—those of antiquity, and the long lineage of exegesis. Textual studies were supplemented with other Latin exercises, including orations and disputations. This textual orientation continued in the medical faculty, where Galen and Hippocrates were read in Latin translations. Since early modern culture had a very uncertain concept of scientific progress, the entire corpus of medical writing from the Greeks to the present day was considered relevant to the training of physicians; especially important were the texts of Arabic physicians, who had preserved and extended the medical texts of antiquity. Students generally read these texts, annotated them, and commented on them in Latin; beginning at the end of the sixteenth century, scholars rigorously investigated the Greek and Arabic texts in their original languages. Early modern learned medicine, then, was both relentlessly textual and increasingly translingual.
Moreover, the disciplinary lines between medicine and other courses of study were still porous. Natural philosophy included investigations of both the body and the mind, and was considered the common property of all learned writers. For example, Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), for example, the companion of Luther and “schoolmaster of Germany,” wrote an extensive commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima that included long chapters on anatomy and physiology, including an extensive and theologically significant discussion of humors and spirits. Members of the arts faculty might give Latin speeches praising medicine at university exercises, throwing in criticisms of Paracelsan innovations; members of the medical faculty might speak on issues related to their discipline to the whole university.
Paradoxically, this textual orientation sponsored practices of direct investigation, raising questions about the relationships among natural objects, vernacular terms, and Latin terms. On the one hand, scholars were grappling with an immense number of new plants and animals discovered in the new world. On the other, critical readers of Greek and Roman natural histories sought to reconcile the inconsistencies among their sources, and to establish some relationship between the descriptions in Pliny and Dioscorides and the plants they knew. What plant, exactly, was the rhubarb that the ancients valued so highly? Did it have any relationship to plants called by a similar name by early modern physicians? Sorting out these relationships required careful practices of observation and extensive correspondence and exchange of specimens among natural historians. The unstable relationships among Latin words, vernacular words, and familiar objects could emerge in any field. In Melanchthon’s final dialectical treatise, Erotemata Dialectices (1558),i he discusses definition:
It is the definition of a word when you interpret a word from a foreign language with a familiar word from our language and you name the genus, as when you say: Centuary is a plant which we call “tausent gulden” or Aurin, the genus and the name you hear is less strange, and yet it can happen that the thing itself is still unknown.ii\
The gaps between familiar names, everyday objects, and passages in ancient texts drew attention to the need for observation, lest “res adhuc ignota sit.” There were many strategies for bridging such gaps: translating or transliterating the Latin name a vernacular; translating a vernacular name into Latin—a vast web of language practices that would only be regularized by Linneus in the 18th century, with the invention of that strange and restricted Latin used for botanical classification. The intersection between Latins and vernaculars was a busy crossroads of knowledge, a place where intense study of textual differences prompted wide-ranging collection and exchange of specimens.
Early modern learned natural philosophers and physicians established networks of correspondence to support such reflections, to share their experiences of treating patients, and to solicit answers to questions. Their letters were collected, each writer bundling the previous letters on a topic with his own contribution, and sending the whole series to his next correspondent, moving across national and confessional boundaries. Such collections were premediations of the learned journals that would emerge in the last decades of the seventeenth century. Journals like the Proceedings of the Royal Society, seeking an international scope and readership, relied on correspondents from the whole of Europe, many of whom could only conveniently address the society in Latin.
Considering the significance of Latin for early modern medicine, therefore, opens important windows on the language practices of today’s globalized medicine. Specifically, it offers a model of how translingual practices can support relationships of exchange and collaboration, as well as those of subordination and marginalization.
Textuality of medicine; leads to practices of observation; mediation of exchange via Latin; correspondence, journal publication.