Examples and Disease Patterns: Medical Case Histories in Dutch Texts of Early Modern Times

• Applicant: Dr. Bettina Noak
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; Early Modern History ; History of Science
• Term: from 2012 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 209750122

In this project, the genre of the medical case study in Early Modern literature from the Netherlands will for the first time be examined with view to its importance in the context of literature and knowledge. It is our aim to accentuate the complex reciprocity of aesthetic, ethical and scientific discourses in Early Modern Dutch literature against the backdrop of a typologogy of medical case studies that we intend to develop during the project. The theoretic frameworks of this project are reflections on history and the form and function of scientific narratives. On the whole, the project wants to contribute to shedding light on the interrelation of certain narrative patterns and the scientific shifts of Early Modernity. The starting point of our analysis is the traditional humanistic case study, which is based on the model of the literary exemplum. Of special interest here is the nexus of different medical, historical, political, theological and philosophical discourses. A second focal point of the project will be the case studies of Cartesian medicine. Here, we are concerned with the scientification of medical observations, but also with the consequences the application of Cartesian teachings has for the perception of the human body and the perception of illness in general. The third focal point will be the empirical case histories such as in the work of Dutch anatomists in the seventeenth century. In this regard we will study the relationship between empiricism and aesthetics. To accentuate the spread of these debates within a transnational frame, a fourth objective of the project is an analysis of the transfer of the Dutch model of case studies into the German speaking context.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants