Published 24 February 2026 in News
ELBOW Research Project
The International Conference: Between Marginal and Mainstream
University of Helsinki - ELBOW Research Project
Fabianinkatu 33, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
11–13 March 2026
Between Marginal and Mainstream: Negotiating Experimental Practices and Medical Knowledge, 1600–1900
Healing is a social practice that cuts through all social classes and categories. Sickness is a shared historical experience, and the need to explain, contain, and cure it has been prevalent in all historical societies. Conceptualisations of illness and methods of healing have, however, differed significantly in different cultures, societies, and temporal moments, as healing practices are deeply entangled with religion, social rituals, and cultural beliefs (Porter, 1997).
The question of experiment is at the core of knowledge and practices of healing. Following the so-called ‘scientific revolution’, new medical knowledge has increasingly been both gained and tested through experimentation, but development of cures through trial-and-error has a much longer and epistemologically multivalent history.
This international conference explores how different forms of experimental practices have been used to gain knowledge around healing and the human body at large both within and outside scholarly medicine. Our goal is to access and examine how experimentation has taken place and shaped knowledge around questions of health and healing roughly between the years 1600 and 1900.
Rather than being wedded to enforcing any teleological narrative of the ‘victorious progress of normal science’, we are interested in the multiplicity of perspectives, voices, and narratives which make up the history of medicine—with ‘medicine’ understood in the broadest of terms to mean elite, mainstream, scholarly, and orthodox approaches as well as folk, popular, magical, or alternative practices, leaning on the concept of medical pluralism (e.g. Jütte 2013; Hokkanen & Kananoja 2019; Ernst, 2002). In other words, we are interested in the contingent processes, manifold methods, and implicit power structures through which different forms of experimental healing practices either became a normalised and respectable part of established medicine, or were forgotten or labelled as quackery, folk medicine, superstition, or pseudoscience.
These questions have been foregrounded by researchers examining the birth of ‘normal science’ (e.g. Fara, 2003; McCalman, 2006; Porter, 1988; Stolberg 2003), as well as scholarship on the situatedness of knowledges and the myth of ‘scientific objectivity’, pointing out how normalisation of certain forms of knowledge is a social process, dependent on societies’ gendered, classed, and racialised norms (e.g. Haraway, 1988; Schiebinger, 1993). Such questions are still relevant today, perhaps now more than ever, with the rapid development of new medical technologies on the one hand, and the rise of science denialism, anti-vaxx movement, and popularity of alternative therapies on the other.
DAY 1 – 11 March 2026
9:30-10:15 Registration and coffee / Main building, small hall lobby
10:15-10:30 Opening words / Main building, small hall F4050
10:30–12:00 Keynote 1 / Main building, small hall F4050
Lauren Kassell: Bedside Medicine in Early Modern England
12:00–13:30 Lunch
13:30–15:00 Session 1A Religion and folk healing / Main building, small hall F4050
Jagriti: State, Religion and Health: A case study of Kashmir Medical Mission, 1863-1904
Ulla Ijäs: Pastors wives and medical knowledge in the 19th century Finland
Eduardo Ángel Cruz: The Saints’ Secret Nurses: Indigenous and Afro-Latin Women Testing Cures in Colonial Miracle Records
13:30–15:00 Session 1B Minds, bodies, and nerves / Main building F3017
Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon: Irreconcilable experiences? Conflicting sources of medical knowledge and practices in Bernard Mandeville’s Treatise of Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases (1730)
Mona Mannevuo: “Neurasthenia is not a new name for hysteria” – Diagnosis of neurasthenia in late nineteenth-century medical literature
Katja Palokangas: Mental assessments in homicide cases in the 19th century Finland
15:00-15:30 Coffee / Main building, small hall lobby
15:30–17:00 Session 2A Medical Electricity / Main building, small hall F4050
Soile Ylivuori: Experimenting with Eels – Colonial Space and Medical Electricity in the Eighteenth Century
Saara-Maija Kontturi: Scientific Optimism, Skepticism, and Developing Methodology in Medical Electricity in Sweden and Finland
Stefan Schröder: A Universal Remedy or Bogus? The Coverage of the Contested Science of Medical Electricity in Mid-Eighteenth-Century German Newspapers
15:30–17:00 Session 2B Embodied medical knowledge / Main building F3017
Tilmann Walter: When Clinical Knowledge Became Mainstream: Therapy in the Letters and Consils of the Imperial Physician Johannes Crato (1519–85)
Ùna Faller: The green-sick body and her embodied knowledge of green sickness, or the ‘disease of virgins’
Edna Huotari: The Embodied and Electric patient in Revolutionary France
17:00–19:00 Wine Reception / Main building, small hall lobby
DAY 2– 12 March 2026
10:00–10:30 Coffee / Main building, small hall lobby
10:30–12:00 Keynote 2 / Main building, small hall F4050
Markku Hokkanen: Negotiating healing between marginal and mainstream: experimentation and cross-cultural medical encounters in South-Central Africa, c. 1850s-1900s
12:00–13:30 Lunch
13:30–15:00 Session 3A ELBOW Talks Hybrid Session / Main building, small hall F4050
Clare Griffin: The Science of Unicorns: Early Modern Russia’s Only Drug Trial
Clarice Säävälä: “He does me real good by his kindness”: The Role of Sympathy in Healing the Patient in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Marek Maj: Matted hair as fetish object: bodily experimentation in the nineteenth-century Polish countryside
13:30–15:00 Session 3B Between Folk Healing and Medicine / Main building F3017
Moshumee Dewoo: Animalist Healing, European Medicine, and the Third Space of Medical Legitimacy in Southern Africa
Elena Badanai: From Folklore to Medical Science in Post-Unified Italy
Annika Raapke: Bodies on the Rock: Treating Disease in Swedish St. Barthelemy
13:30–15:00 Session 3C Surgeons and surgery / Main building U4072
Anu Lahtinen & Mirkka Lappalainen: Craftsmen in Medicine: Barber-surgeons in Early 17th Century Stockholm
Samu Sarviaho: Barber-surgeons in Transition: Medical Practice and Changes in Treatment in 1800s Finland
Karolina Kouvola: Healing Testicular Cancer in Nineteenth-Century Finland: The Case of a Parish Clerk
15:00–15:30 Coffee / Main building, small hall lobby
15:30–17:00 Session 4A Medical Epistemes / Main building, small hall F4050
Mursed Alam: Marginal Medicalities from South Asia: Colonial Biopolitics, Decolonial Aporia and Indigenous Survival Epistemes
Claire Crignon: Observing Folk Practices and Beliefs About Healing and Curing: The Importance of Bacon’s Natural Histories in Understanding His Skeptical View of Medical Progress (1605-1638)
Shawn M. Phillips: Experimentation, Morality, & Therapeutics: Mercurial Cures and Shifting Applications from Humoral Theory to Germ Theory
15:30–17:00 Session 4B Ointments and elixirs / Main building F3017
Aleksi Moine: Christ’s Blood and Mary’s Milk – Religion, Ointments and Bodies in 19th-Century Finno-Karelian Healing Incantations
Brian Li: Staving off Hunger for 100 days: A Close Reading of Lapidary Elixirs in the Bencao gangmu
Tarquin Holmes: A Disgusting and useless substance? A Brief History of Hyraceum
18:00 Conference dinner
DAY 3 – 13 March 2026
10:00–10:30 Coffee / Main building, small hall lobby
10:30-12:00 Keynote 3 / Main building, small hall F4050
Paola Bertucci: The Anatomy of the Living: Occupational Health between Medical Knowledge and Statecraft
12:00-13:30 Lunch
13:30–15:00 Session 5A Drinking health / Main building, small hall F4050
Yiyun Huang: Panacea or pernicious drug: Situating Chinese Tea in Early Modern European Medicine
Kim Embrey: From Sacred Leaf to Scientific Specimen
François Zanetti: Too good to be true – Debates on evaluation procedures for mineral waters in the 18th c.
13:30–15:00 Session 5B Religion and medicine / Main building, Studium 1 F3020
Dan Blackie: Medicine, Faith, and Disability in Late Georgian England
Auli Saarsalmi-Paalasmaa: The Training of Nurses in Seventh-day Adventists’ St. Helena Nursing School
Riikka Miettinen: Medical Pluralism and Religious Intersections in Healing Madness in Early Modern Sweden
15:00–15:30 Coffee / Main building, small hall lobby
15:30–17:00 Session 6A Colonial medicine / Main building, small hall F4050
Eva Johanna Holmberg: Distempered with Greeuous Sicknesses: Healing and Experimenting with the Badly ‘Environed’ Body of Thomas West, Lord De La Warr in Virginia, 1610-11
Delphine Peiretti-Courtis: A History of Medical Errors : Studies, Experiences, and Care Practices on Black Bodies in the French Colonies of Africa (1780-1910)
Chechesh Kudachinova: Creating Colonial Healing and Making Experiential Knowledge in 17th-Century Settler Siberia
15:30–17:00 Session 6B Natural healing / Main building, Studium 1 F3020
Eeva Heinonen: Unveiling the Materiality of Nature in the Early Modern Medical Discourse
Suvi Rytty: Embodied Experience in Natural Healing Narratives in Early Twentieth-Century Finland
Pieter Dhondt: Challenging the Orthodoxy of Medical Knowledge by Promoting Homeopathy as an Academic Subject Around 1900
17:00–18:00 Closing words / Main building, small hall F4050
For more information about The International Conference: Between Marginal and Mainstream please navigate to ELBOW Research Project website here