Convener
Guy Geltner, Monash University
Keynote Speaker
Pamela H. Smith, Columbia University
This international and interdisciplinary conference brings to a close the activities of the grant team “Pursuing Public Health in the Preindustrial World, 1100-1800.” Beyond the team itself, it involves a dozen scholars working across health history, history of science and technology, religion, archaeology and landscape in areas covering Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and East and Southeast Asia.
The conference will be both remote and in-person. Attendance is free but requires registration. Please register at the following link: click here.
For the full program: click here.
About the Conference
Health was a goal pursued by numerous societies prior to industrialised modernity. While their definitions of health and disease could differ widely, earlier cultures organised themselves around promoting the former and fighting the latter with their available means. They did so, moreover, in diverse, changing and challenging locations around the world and in response to the specific risks these were thought to pose. This conference aims, not only to showcase the team’s research on public health history, but also to situate it within and assess its potential impact on several fields, including environmental history, the history of science and technology, bioarchaeology, landscape archaeology, mobility studies, religious studies and gender studies.
Over the past four years, the team has worked across the regions of Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and Southeast Asia, reconstructing practices meant to fight disease and promote health at the community level. Specifically, team members examined (mobile) courts, pilgrims and miners, and how they intervened in their changing environments to improve health outcomes. The choice of regions and societies allowed us, first, to venture beyond the European, urban and sedentary focus of most revisionary work on premodern public health history in the recent past; and, secondly, to critically integrate methodologies from archaeology, religious studies and other fields. Collectively these have enriched the available toolkit for detecting healthscaping activities in the deeper past.
The concluding conference will bring together the original team as well as a keynote speaker and invited scholars across several fields, periods and career stages. Presentations will explore both traditional and more recent themes converging on public health history, including biopower, the public sphere and transitions into modernity; the mingling of spiritual and physical health; the gendering of community healthcare; and the spatial and material dimensions of health.
