Cultural Approaches to the History of Medicine: Mediating Medicine in Early Modern and Modern Europe

The subtitle reveals how they went about this task: the contributors were asked to focus on the ways in which the meaning of medical conditions and the nature of medical practice were (and are) mediated through multifaceted and complex social interactions, through forms of representation, and through sets of values and beliefs. What, I found myself asking, was the role of material culture and the biological in processes of mediation? (There seems to be a tension between the editors' critique of historians who present diseases as autonomous entities [p. 5] and Hera Cook's discussion of biologically effective forms of birth control [p. 200].)