Medical competence, anatomy and the polity in seventeenth-century Rome.
At the centre of this article are two physicians active in Rome between 1600 and 1630 who combined medical practice with broader involvement in the dynamic cultural, economic and political scene of the centre of the Catholic world. The city's distinctive and very influential social landscape magnified issues of career-building and allows us to recapture physicians’ different strategies of self-fashioning at a time of major social and religious reorganization. At one level, reconstructing Johannes Faber and Giulio Mancini's medical education, arrival in Rome and overlapping but different career trajectories contributes to research on physicians’ identity in early modern Italian states. Most remarkable are their access to different segments of Roman society, including a dynamic art market, and their diplomatic and political role, claimed as well as real. But following these physicians from hospitals to courts, including that of the Pope, and from tribunals to the university and analysing the wide range of their writing – from medico-legal consilia to political essays and reports of anatomical investigations – also enriches our view of medical practice, which included, but went beyond, the bedside. Furthermore, their activities demand that we reassess the complex place of anatomical investigations in a courtly society, and start recovering the fundamental role played by hospitals – those quintessential Catholic institutions – as sites of routine dissections for both medical teaching and research. (pp. 551–567)
[Medicine in the Giornale de'letterati].
The Giornale de' letterati published in Rome from 1668 to 1681 was the first Italian scientific journal. It was meant to be the Italian version of the French Journal des Sçavans or the English Philosophical Transactions. Unlike these two, it was not backed by a formal or informal scientific institution, even if one of its editors, Giovanni Giustino Ciampini, was the founder of the Accademia Fisico-Matematica, the leading scientific academy in Rome in the second half of the XVIIth century. The paper, a preliminary step in a study on the diffusion and communication of European medical culture in Rome in this period, indexes and broadly examines the articles pertaining to medicine published in the journal.
Yun Ch’i-ho’s Alienation by Way of Inclusion: A Korean International Student and Christian Reform in the “New” South, 1888–1893
This article explores Yun Ch’i-ho’s studies and social life at Vanderbilt University and Emory College between 1888 and 1893, and the expectations surrounding white Methodists’ investment in his mission to bring Christian and national reform to Korea. Yun’s diary entries document the tensions that existed between late nineteenth-century articulations of white supremacy and, conversely, missionaries’ idealized framing of Christianity as a universally accessible means for uplift, which any race or nation could pursue equally. Yun offers a unique perspective on the era’s global politics of racial identification and on what the alliances and institutional relationships that missionary work necessitated meant personally.