Wir möchten Sie zu einem interessanten „Vortrag im Josephinum“ einladen:

    Ort: Lesesaal des „Josephinum“, Währinger Strasse 25, A – 1090 Wien
    Zeit: 13. Dezember 2007, 18.00 c.t.
    Kontakt: sammlungen@meduniwien.ac.at
                 ++43/ 1/ 40160/ 26000

Dr. EMMA SPARY,(Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL)

Eating Expertise:
‘Health’ Foods in the Workshops and Institutions of Old Regime Paris

The appearance of a category of health foods among the commodities available in the shops of Paris in the final decades of the old regime has passed unnoticed by historians and it is generally held to be the case that health foods were an invention of the late nineteenth century onwards. The paper centres upon documentation deriving from the endorsement or rejection of alimentary products by the Société Royale de Médecine, given the right to inspect all such goods in 1778. Through the debates over the health foods investigated by the Société and other scientific or medical institutions, we can show how knowledge-claims about health were materialised—in the most literal way—by being ingested. At the same time, we can explore the ways in which epistemological and alimentary authority were negotiated between producers, consumers and the scientific and medical elite in the late eighteenth-century city.

Dr. EMMA SPARY received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1993. She has worked on the history of natural history and agriculture, resulting in a monograph, Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago, 2000). She has also jointly edited two volumes of essays on this subject, Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge, 1996) and Sammeln als Wissen (Göttingen, 2001). Her current research activities include a book on the history of scientific and medical accounts of eating in Paris between 1675 and 1815, provisionally entitled Eating the Enlightenment; and a volume of essays, Between Market and Laboratory: Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe, co-edited with Ursula Klein. She is employed at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.