Margaret Carlyle
My research focuses on the history of the human sciences, medical technology, the material culture of science, and gender and women in early modern France in both European and Atlantic contexts. I am also interested in Polynesian natural knowledge formation and "the sciences of man" in the eighteenth-century French Pacific.
I am currently completing two monographs focusing on aspects of Enlightenment medical science. The first is entitled "Women and Anatomy in Enlightenment France." In this book, I show that while the long eighteenth century was not an age of breakthroughs in human anatomy, it was a dynamic time of disciplinary ferment that opened up doors to unexpected practitioners. One of these was Marie-Marguerite Biheron, who gained acclaim for fashioning lifelike waxworks of pregnant women. Anatomists like Biheron forged a new way of making knowledge about the human body. Beyond the traditional task of dissecting corpses, they taught and presented their research findings in new forms: three-dimensional models, textbooks, and illustrations. This approach brought patron-sponsored anatomical learning into a brand new commercial world in which women participated as students and collecetors. My aim is to recast the Enlightenment era as a crucial moment in the history of anatomy that bridges the preceding Renaissance "rebirth" of human dissecting with the nineteenth-century rise of "modern medicine" in laboratory and clinical spaces.
My second monograph project underway is entitled "Delivering the Enlightenment: Reproductive Technologies in the French Atlantic World." Drawing on both texts and medical objects, I argue that both women and men pioneered tools and techniques in order to forge a new, pragmatic approach to childbirth. It was one grounded in the rationalization of the female body in the name of patient care and a fresh approach to the natural world that favored technological development. Although the male takeover of midwifery is a part of this story, I show that the advance of artificial tools over natural methods was more directly the product of public debates over reproduction and state pressure to streamline birthing practices in France and its Caribbean colonies.
I have co-curated a major exhibition with the physician, Brian Callender, for the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library in winter 2019. "The Fetus in Utero: From Mystery to Social Media" provides a 500-year visual history of the fetal image, from medieval woodcuts to contemporary three-dimensional printing. We seek to show how the fetal image has gained iconic status in our times, to the extent that the ultrasound has become what might be the most easily recognized medical image.
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I am currently completing two monographs focusing on aspects of Enlightenment medical science. The first is entitled "Women and Anatomy in Enlightenment France." In this book, I show that while the long eighteenth century was not an age of breakthroughs in human anatomy, it was a dynamic time of disciplinary ferment that opened up doors to unexpected practitioners. One of these was Marie-Marguerite Biheron, who gained acclaim for fashioning lifelike waxworks of pregnant women. Anatomists like Biheron forged a new way of making knowledge about the human body. Beyond the traditional task of dissecting corpses, they taught and presented their research findings in new forms: three-dimensional models, textbooks, and illustrations. This approach brought patron-sponsored anatomical learning into a brand new commercial world in which women participated as students and collecetors. My aim is to recast the Enlightenment era as a crucial moment in the history of anatomy that bridges the preceding Renaissance "rebirth" of human dissecting with the nineteenth-century rise of "modern medicine" in laboratory and clinical spaces.
My second monograph project underway is entitled "Delivering the Enlightenment: Reproductive Technologies in the French Atlantic World." Drawing on both texts and medical objects, I argue that both women and men pioneered tools and techniques in order to forge a new, pragmatic approach to childbirth. It was one grounded in the rationalization of the female body in the name of patient care and a fresh approach to the natural world that favored technological development. Although the male takeover of midwifery is a part of this story, I show that the advance of artificial tools over natural methods was more directly the product of public debates over reproduction and state pressure to streamline birthing practices in France and its Caribbean colonies.
I have co-curated a major exhibition with the physician, Brian Callender, for the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library in winter 2019. "The Fetus in Utero: From Mystery to Social Media" provides a 500-year visual history of the fetal image, from medieval woodcuts to contemporary three-dimensional printing. We seek to show how the fetal image has gained iconic status in our times, to the extent that the ultrasound has become what might be the most easily recognized medical image.
Address: https://hs.ok.ubc.ca/about/contact/margaret-carlyle/
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Papers by Margaret Carlyle
While the “Anatomical Venus” was an important figure who dazzled audiences in such enlightened cities as Vienna, London, and Florence, we know much less about her bloodier, messier counterpart who lay on the dissecting table: the female corpse. This essay makes a case for the importance of the female corpse—what I will call the “flesh-and-blood Venus”—to anatomical inquiry. By looking at dissections of such Venuses behind closed doors, before auditoriums of eager students, and in medical imagery, this essay shows that the flesh-and-blood Venus functioned less as a spectacle than as a testament to the anatomist’s disciplinary mastery. Examples of a mummified mistress, a teenager found lifeless in a ravine, and a woman who died in the ninth month of her pregnancy will show how the female corpse was central to new forms of anatomical inquiry in such fields as childbirth and forensics. The flesh-and-blood Venus provided anatomists with a unique research site to advance new knowledge claims while displaying their disciplinary expertise.
Teaching Documents by Margaret Carlyle
While the “Anatomical Venus” was an important figure who dazzled audiences in such enlightened cities as Vienna, London, and Florence, we know much less about her bloodier, messier counterpart who lay on the dissecting table: the female corpse. This essay makes a case for the importance of the female corpse—what I will call the “flesh-and-blood Venus”—to anatomical inquiry. By looking at dissections of such Venuses behind closed doors, before auditoriums of eager students, and in medical imagery, this essay shows that the flesh-and-blood Venus functioned less as a spectacle than as a testament to the anatomist’s disciplinary mastery. Examples of a mummified mistress, a teenager found lifeless in a ravine, and a woman who died in the ninth month of her pregnancy will show how the female corpse was central to new forms of anatomical inquiry in such fields as childbirth and forensics. The flesh-and-blood Venus provided anatomists with a unique research site to advance new knowledge claims while displaying their disciplinary expertise.
Through the Scientific Revolution, the authoritative knowledge of the ancients, including the Greek natural philosopher Aristotle and the Greek physician Galen, was increasingly called into question. The ancients held that the earth sat at the centre of the universe, that everything beneath the moon was composed of four elements and was subject to constant change, and that the best way to understand natural changes was qualitatively, in terms of four 'causes.' Human health and disease were understood to be the resulting im/balance of the four humors: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. These views of both the macrocosm and the microcosm persisted from Greco-Roman Antiquity through to the rise of the universities in the Middle Ages.
This course grapples with the two "sides" of the Scientific Revolution, represented by two key works published in 1543: Nicolaus Copernicus's On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres and Andreas Vesalius' On the Fabric of the Human Body. Through these radical works, as well those of other investigators (Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, Newton, Emilie du Châtelet), we see how new views about the celestial and human worlds proliferated across Western Europe. From the very large to the very small, existing conceptions were challenged, transformed, and finally repudiated wholesale.
Our goal in this course is to build a picture of such revolutionary changes, by focusing as much on canonical thinkers and their new models of and approaches to nature, as the material, spatial, and social contexts in and through which new ideas developed. To that end, this course adopts a roughly chronological theme-based approach that gives special place to the new research tools and spaces of the Scientific Revolution. We chart the development of instruments of science, including telescopes, microscopes, and surgical tools, as well as emerging spaces, including astronomical observatories, (al)chemical laboratories, and anatomical amphitheatres. We also explore the relationship between "high" and "low" scientific cultures, by looking at the dawn of the printing press, theories of the "plurality of worlds," and the shifting meanings of comets and other stellar activity within the popular imaginary.
Assessment: 1. Participation 15% 2. Reading responses 5 x 3% = 15% 3. Take-home midterm & final essays 2 X 20% = 40%
Lectures will broadly speaking adopt a chronological framework, with emphasis placed on how revolutionary change influenced people’s lives, experiences, and views on a European and global scale. We will set out to uncover what people thought and believed throughout early modern and modern European revolutionary history, including their views on the right way to live, forms of government, the meaning of life, and social organisation.
Depictions like these of the fetus inside the womb—the fetus in utero—have become iconic. So much so that the fetal ultrasound might be the most familiar medical image today. But this has not always been the case. The fetal ultrasound image was for a long time confined to the doctor’s office, where it was viewed, and only briefly, if at all, by the pregnant woman.
How, then, did the fetal ultrasound become such an iconic image?
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The Cabinet has been running since the late 1980s, and has become an important forum for the presentation of research into all aspects of the history of natural history, collecting, and the life and earth sciences from antiquity to the very recent past. The seminar is conceived as a setting for the presentation of work-in-progress, new research projects, or as an opportunity to present polished pieces of work.
In the 2014-2015 academic year, we will continue to build on the success of Things, while pushing the already popular series in new and innovative directions. Considering the current “material turn” in scholarship, this year’s series will emphasise the importance of materiality in object study, and we have thus entitled the next year’s seminar: Things that Matter, 1400-1900. This play-on-words emphasizes the need to focus scholarship on the material composition of an object in addition to the object’s relevance, appearance, and use. A deeper awareness of the matter will allow speakers to emphasize how the economic, cultural, and physical attributes of certain materials and their meanings contributed to understanding the value and connotations of objects in their original contexts.
We are looking forward to an exciting year!