Chelsea Silva, assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State University, will deliver a talk titled "Manual medicine: props, probes and the medieval surgeon's hands."

As in the 21st century, relationships in the Middle Ages between suffering patients and their medical practitioners necessarily involved negotiations of trust. Particularly in England and Scotland, where licensure regulation occurred much later than in continental Europe, assessing a practitioner's credibility was often the prerogative not of a professional committee, but of the prospective patient.

Healthcare practitioners turned to a range of strategies to secure the trust of potential clients, including the use of props such as surgical tools, whose value to the would-be professional extended beyond their use in medical procedures. In practical treatises, literary texts and legal accounts, instruments such as lancets and forceps signified the expertise of their user, separating the practitioner from the patient. In the surgeon's steady and credible hands — which were themselves often figured as specialized medical instruments — these objects promised treatment and cure.

In the hands of the fraud, however, they became visible not as proof of proficiency but as props alarmingly prone to appropriation. This talk explores how medieval writers thought through the dangerous separability of materia medica from the expertise it seemingly signified, focusing particularly on the association — and rupture — of the surgeon's hands and the tools they used.

This talk will take place in Kimpel Hall 409 at 11:50 a.m. today, Wednesday, March 5.

A light lunch is provided. 

This event is sponsored by the programs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and in Medical Humanities.