{"id":279,"date":"2017-09-04T19:02:35","date_gmt":"2017-09-04T19:02:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/?page_id=279"},"modified":"2018-05-31T15:11:21","modified_gmt":"2018-05-31T15:11:21","slug":"sue-wells","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/profiles\/sue-wells\/","title":{"rendered":"Sue Wells"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SueTitle:\u00a0<\/strong>Professor Emerita, English<\/p>\n

University:\u00a0<\/strong>Temple University<\/p>\n

Email:\u00a0<\/strong>suewells@temple.edu<\/p>\n

Twitter:\u00a0<\/strong>N\/A<\/p>\n

Website:\u00a0<\/strong>N\/A<\/p>\n

Description of Work:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I have written<\/span><\/span>\u00a0two projects focusing on gender and medical writing\u2014<\/span><\/span>Our<\/span><\/span>\u00a0of the Dead House,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>an account of the writing practices of nineteenth\u00a0<\/span><\/span>century women physicians, and\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Our Bodies Ourselves and the Work of Writing<\/span><\/span>, an analysis of the writing practices of the Boston Women\u2019s Health Book Collective.\u00a0 I am currently working on a\u00a0<\/span><\/span>The Anatomy of Melancholy and Early Modern Practices of Knowledge<\/span><\/span>, a book that will place\u00a0<\/span><\/span>The Anatomy\u00a0<\/span><\/span>in the context of early modern learning at the cusp of the emergence of new sciences, with special emphasis on medicine.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Symposium Submission:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Early Modern\u00a0<\/b>Translingual<\/b>\u00a0Medicine<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Contemporary sociolinguistics, confronting the spread of many\u00a0Englishes, has developed a theory of\u00a0translinguality\u00a0to trace the mutual influences among languages as speakers encounter them in a global setting.\u00a0 Such confrontations are not new; they happen and they did happen in both everyday life and in specialized practices such as medicine.\u00a0 This paper will explore the relations among Latin and vernaculars in early modern medicine, focusing on\u00a0academic medicine in England at\u00a0the middle of the seventeenth century.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Medicine, along with law and divinity, was among the three professions for which universities offered training.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In all these fields, the curriculum was based on Latin texts\u2014those of antiquity, and the long lineage of exegesis.\u00a0 Textual studies were supplemented with other Latin exercises, including orations and disputations.\u00a0 This textual orientation continued in the medical faculty, where Galen and Hippocrates were read in Latin translations.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Early modern learned medicine, then, was both relentlessly textual and increasingly\u00a0translingual.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, the disciplinary lines between medicine and other courses of study were still porous.\u00a0 Natural philosophy included investigations of both the body and the mind, and was considered the common property of all learned writers.\u00a0\u00a0For example,\u00a0Philip Melanchthon\u00a0(1497-1560), for example, the companion of Luther and \u201cschoolmaster of Germany,\u201d\u00a0wrote an extensive commentary on Aristotle\u2019s\u00a0De Anima\u00a0<\/i>that included long chapters on anatomy and physiology, including an extensive and theologically significant discussion of humors and spirits.\u00a0 Members of the arts faculty might give Latin speeches praising medicine at university exercises, throwing in criticisms of\u00a0Paracelsan\u00a0innovations; members of the medical faculty might speak on issues related to their discipline to the whole university.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Paradoxically, this textual orientation sponsored\u00a0practices of direct investigation,\u00a0raising\u00a0questions about the relationships among natural objects, vernacular terms,\u00a0and Latin terms.\u00a0On the one hand, scholars were grappling with an immense number of new plants and animals discovered in the new world.\u00a0 On the other, critical readers of Greek and Roman natural histories sought to reconcile\u00a0the inconsistencies among their\u00a0sources, and to establish some relationship between the descriptions in\u00a0Pliny and\u00a0Dioscorides\u00a0and the plants they knew.\u00a0 What plant, exactly, was the rhubarb that the ancients valued so highly?\u00a0 Did it have any relationship to plants called by a\u00a0similar 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.\u00a0 In Melanchthon\u2019s final dialectical treatise,\u00a0Erotemata<\/i>\u00a0<\/i>Dialectices<\/i>\u00a0(1558),i<\/span>\u00a0he discusses definition:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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:\u00a0Centuary\u00a0is a plant which we call \u201ctausent\u00a0gulden\u201d or\u00a0Aurin, the genus and the name you hear is less strange, and yet it can happen that the thing itself is still unknown.ii<\/span>\\\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The gaps between familiar names, everyday objects, and passages in ancient texts drew attention to the need for observation, lest \u201cres\u00a0<\/i>adhuc<\/i>\u00a0<\/i>ignota<\/i>\u00a0sit.<\/i>\u201d\u00a0There were many strategies for bridging such gaps: translating or transliterating the Latin name a vernacular; translating a vernacular name into Latin\u2014a vast web of language practices that would only be regularized by\u00a0Linneus\u00a0in the 18th<\/span>\u00a0century, with the invention of that strange and restricted Latin used for botanical classification.\u00a0\u00a0The intersection between\u00a0Latins\u00a0and vernaculars was a busy crossroads of knowledge, a place where intense study of textual differences prompted wide-ranging collection and exchange of specimens.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Their\u00a0letters\u00a0were\u00a0collected, 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.\u00a0 Such collections were\u00a0premediations\u00a0of the learned journals that would emerge in the last decades of the seventeenth century.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Considering the significance of Latin for early modern medicine, therefore, opens important windows on the language practices of today\u2019s globalized medicine.\u00a0 Specifically, it offers a model of how\u00a0translingual\u00a0practices\u00a0can\u00a0support relationships of exchange and collaboration, as well as those of\u00a0subordination and marginalization.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Textuality\u00a0of medicine; leads to practices of observation; mediation of exchange via Latin; correspondence, journal publication.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Title:\u00a0Professor Emerita, English University:\u00a0Temple University Email:\u00a0suewells@temple.edu Twitter:\u00a0N\/A Website:\u00a0N\/A Description of Work: I have written\u00a0two projects focusing on gender and medical writing\u2014Our\u00a0of the Dead House,\u00a0an account of the writing practices of … Continue reading “Sue Wells”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":2,"menu_order":53,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-279","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":793,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/279\/revisions\/793"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}