Kierri Price (Birkbeck, London/Wellcome Collection), 'Materiality, Embodiment, and Lived Experience in Medieval English Medical Manuscripts'
Abstract:
Modern-day healthcare is an exercise in tangible record-keeping, covering everything from prescription requests and test results through to health insurance terms and conditions and patient feedback forms. Despite their often-personal nature, many of these records can feel very detached, couched in unfamiliar, jargon-dense language, or otherwise overly simplistic and reductive. But there are also records of a much more emotionally-resonant kind: post-it notes taken into doctor’s appointments; leaflets with key aspects underlined or circled; internet history searches of a constellation of symptoms, suggestions, or concerns. These non-clinical records show something of the lived experience of medicine, an intimate insight into the emotions and personal perspectives of people grappling with their health and wellbeing.
Medieval records of healthcare have a very different character, with textual evidence of medicine predominated by recipes and remedies, alongside learned treatises. The encyclopaedic gathering of these texts, frequently on pristine pages, disguises the lived experience of the people these texts (supposedly) sought to treat. However, there are tangible remnants that can shed light on the emotional and practical experiences of medieval ‘patients’, allowing us a more nuanced understanding of what medieval medicine looked like for those who lived it.
This paper focuses on the marginalia, stains, and written interventions in a selection of medieval English medical manuscripts in Wellcome Collection and elsewhere, exploring what these deposits (intentional and accidental) can tell us about how medicine was actually practiced. By uniting textual records with material signs of use, this paper will uncover the hidden narratives of now-nameless individuals, giving voice to their anxieties, hopes, and lived experiences.
Biography:
Kierri Price recently finished their CHASE-funded PhD, a doctoral training partnership between Birkbeck, University of London, and Wellcome Collection. Their thesis (titled “Books, Bodies, and Belief: Awkward Technologies of Protection in Late Medieval England”) covers areas ranging from medical humanities and devotional culture to art history and literature. Kierri’s research is centred in materiality, especially notions of use, somatic engagement, and interactivity. Recent publications include co-authoring “Girding the Loins? Direct Evidence of the Use of a Medieval English Parchment Birthing Girdle from Biomolecular Analysis” in Royal Society Open Science 8:3 (2021), and a spotlight “Birth Girdle” study in the upcoming British Library exhibition book, Medieval Women: In Their Own Words.