Visual Tools in Medical Education in Seventeenth-Century England and the Netherlands

Description

Part of the CRASSH Fellows Work in Progress Seminar Series.  All welcome but please email Michelle Maciejewska to book your place and to request readings.  A sandwich lunch and refreshments are provided.

Dr Sietske Fransen

As part of my project “Visualisation as Translation in Early Modern Science and Medicine” I will present a paper on the use of visual tools in seventeenth-century medical education. To understand the role images played in the communication of medical information it is important to know what and how medical students learned. Did they use illustrated books? Did they draw what they were seeing and hearing in lectures? And were they using images in their theses? Based on the life of Humphrey Ridley (1653-1708), a medical student in Oxford and Leiden, and later lecturer and author, this article will discuss the various stages of a student’s education, including Bachelor, Doctorate, and the published thesis. And subsequently the possible stages afterwards – practising physician, professor. In both phases the role images will be central to the paper. Since Ridley left several sources, including travel diaries from the time he studied in Leiden; notes from the lectures he would later give in London; and a published textbook about the anatomy of the brain, he provides us with a rare case study of the various phases of a medic’s life, and the role images played in it.