Reading and Replicating Bodies: Mimicry in Medicine and Culture, 1790-1914 (an Interdisciplinary workshop). (360G-Wellcome-106710_Z_14_Z)

This one-day workshop will bring together scholars working on the subject of mimicry in the history of medicine. The event will explore how, in nineteenth-century medicine and culture, to know a body was to replicate it. It will ask how medical practices and representations sought to mechanically imitate the body with perfect accuracy, from anatomical models and drawings to prosthetics. How did such replication interact with wider cultural anxieties about the mechanization of the human body? The workshop will also discuss how medicine, and the arts more generally, came to represent human bodies as social-emotional mirrors that instinctively mimicked each other. The meeting will analyse the different, sometimes contradictory, views which emerged of such mimicry, sometimes pathologized as primitive or degenerate, and other times valued as a natural source of sympathy and empathy between humans. The event will trace the afterlife of these practices and concepts in modern bioethical debate s and views of humans as copying animals. The workshop will be held at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and we plan to publish essays based on the event in a guest-edited issue of the open-access online journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century.