Events

Past Event

Stephania Shirilan - Damned Lungs: Plague and the Limits of Community in Early Modern England

January 21, 2025
6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
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Online

Event Description 

Historians of early medicine face a perennial problem of the mismatch between modern and premodern disciplinary and classificatory terms and structures of thought. This is especially true of respiratory illness, whose dynamic history is more richly illuminated by legal, philosophical, and religious writing than more recognizably “medical” treatises of the period.

This lecture demonstrates how cross-disciplinary sources may be used to generate new analyses for the history of medicine. It shows how they help me to trace a history of stigma surrounding respiratory illness to a conflation of breath and grace after the Reformation that renders respiratory ease a hallmark of social and economic status and labored breathing a sign of spiritual defect or despair. 

Event Speaker

Stephanie Shirilan, Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University

Event Information

This event is free and open to the public; Registration required. Please visit the event webpage for additional information. 

Hosted by the New York Academy of Medicine