How to Produce Collective Knowledge from the Sickchamber

I am a literary scholar interested in early modern conceptions of the body. But I also have a general interest in medical humanities and the ways in which knowledge about the body is formed, in the discourses that help shape what a body means, and in how such knowledge about the body gains authority. Early modern how-to books, as Pamela Smith (2022) has recently shown, weren’t individual enterprises – they emerged out of a complex network of agents, both material and non-material. And they w...