Surgeons and scarification: skin marking in early modern medical travel narratives

In 1611 a twenty-year-old Swiss barber-surgeon set sail on the first of five voyages to the West Coast of Africa. Writing from his hometown of Basel, a decade later, he reminisced about the people he had met, the crafts, skills and wonders they produced and the ways in which they adorned their bodies. Full of admiration for hair, cloth, and jewellery, the young man was nonetheless horrified by the practice of scarification. "The people, however, are horrible in appearance. Their faces are scratched heavily with cuts the length of a finger. Their whole body is pricked or perforated". What did pricking or perforating skin mean to this barber-surgeon, and why does his reading of scarification matter to us? Far from representing a consensus on the 'horrible' nature of scarification, the accounts of early modern medical practitioners present varied views on skin marking. Situating their views in the changing cultures of European skin, this paper looks at European 'encounters' with scarification, and race-making as medical practice.

Hannah Murphy is a historian of early modern Europe, with expertise in the history of medicine and science.  She was a Fulbright Scholar at Berkeley, where she received her PhD in 2013. She was subsequently a Junior Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. Since 2017 she has been based at King's College London, where she works on the Wellcome Trust-funded project Renaissance Skin (Evelyn Welch, PI). Her first monograph, A New Order of Medicine; The Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2019, and was the winner of the 2020 Society for Renaissance Studies Bienniel Book Prize. She is currently working on a new project investigating the role of medical practitioners in the early slave trade.

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://york-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcrd-itrTIsE9Yhf9XE6pG3LIzho0a7QF2l

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Image: Pieter da Marees, 'Beschrijvinghe ende historische verhael van het Gout Koninckrijck van Gunea, 1602.