Making Medicine Material: Objects and Materiality in the History of Medicine

abstract: This positioning paper surveys recent historical scholarship on objects and material culture relating to health and medicine. Analyzing scholarship under four main themes—professional medicine; everyday health; spaces, places, and environments; and consumption, globalism, and colonialism—the paper demonstrates the vibrancy and breadth of the field; it outlines how scholarship across these themes has viewed a wide range of objects and forms of materiality as not only integral to medical knowledge and health practices in the past but has often uncovered alternative, subversive, and multiple ways of knowing and doing that are inaccessible by the written word alone. The paper ends by providing possible future directions for scholars keen to further explore the role of materiality in medical knowledge making and practice. In particular, it suggests how scholars might fruitfully expand the material categories they work with, adopt “material time” and include more critical self-awareness in their research.