The Beastly Analog: How Early Modern Medicine Learned to Think through Animal Life

During the early modern period - itself bracketed by animal-borne disease - medicine was organized around a porous boundary between human and animal bodies. Animals were simultaneously patients, remedies, experimental subjects, and models for understanding life itself. The uptick in European-style science, obsessed with splitting and particularization, was a narrow, if productive, anomaly on the global stage, driven in part by the experience of empire. Actors doubled down on medical products and practices that could pass as similar in a global context, obscuring more ancient particularities that made little sense to others abroad. This talk considers how an interest in horses, physiognomy (inferring internal character from external features), and materia medica (ingredients used for medicinal treatments) appears widely across the early modern world, parallels that individuals in an increasingly connected globe sought to exploit.