Everyone is welcome to the first installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. UCLA’s own Assistant Professor Spencer Weinreich will be presenting Experimental Hunger in Early Modern Europe.

This paper examines fasting as an experimental practice in early modern Europe, in which hunger was both an object of knowledge and an instrument of knowledge-making. With claims of miraculous fasting well-nigh ubiquitous, theologians, magistrates, and scholars devised a range of tests to identify imposters, but equally to verify the existence of bona fide miracles. For others, fasting could itself be the experiment, as in the case of William Stark, an eighteenth-century physician who may have accidentally starved himself to death while investigating the science of nutrition. By juxtaposing these cases, the paper identifies the hungering body as a key site for the making of knowledge in early modern Europe, one that problematizes any clear boundaries between medical, religious, and folk knowledge.

See you in the History of Science Room or join us over Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/95456995787