Communicating Disease: Medical Knowledge and Literary Forms in Colonial British America

This dissertation examines the literary repercussions of encounters between European, Native American, and African medical philosophies throughout the British American colonies. In particular, I examine the formation and transformation of colonial literary forms in an intercultural and a transatlantic context, by investigating the ways in which colonists incorporated Native and African knowledge to produce various literary forms. I employ anthropological and ethnohistorical studies to show that colonists displaced competing rhetorical practices by incorporating non-European knowledge to present firsthand descriptions of New World medicines and illnesses. Additionally, colonists transformed their literary strategies to subordinate Native and African knowledge as witchcraft and to distance themselves from colonial encounters. Early Americans' incorporation and subordination of non-European medical philosophies authorized colonial medical knowledge as empirical and rational and facilitated conceptions of cultural differences between colonists, Native Americans, and Africans. My introduction examines medical encounters in the context of early modern medical philosophies and rhetorical practices. Chapter one examines how Thomas Hariot mixed Algonquian theories that disease originated in "invisible bullets" with Paracelsian medical philosophies, connecting seeing and knowing in his true report. Chapter two examines Pilgrim Edward Winslow's appropriation and subordination of shamans' medical practices to provide firsthand accounts of New World wonders in his providence tale. Chapter three examines the 1721 inoculation controversy in the context of Africans' testimony about inoculation, which minister Cotton Mather transcribed to connect words and things in his plain style, and which physician William Douglass satirized to reveal the gap between slaves' words and the true, dangerous nature of inoculation. Chapter four examines how James Grainger incorporated obeah, Africans' medico-religious practices, into his georgic poem to produce images of productive slaves and to construct new conceptions of obeah as witchcraft. Finally, the conclusion examines the ways in which colonists' disavowal of Native and African knowledge as magical continued to haunt U.S. Americans' literary practices, as seen in Arthur Mervyn's gothic tale of his encounter with a healthy black hearse driver during a yellow fever epidemic and Richard Allen and Absalom Jones' argument that blacks possessed superior knowledge of the epidemic

Banner News

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Banner News

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Nineteenth-Century Facebook: John Ridge and the Archives of Cherokee Resistance

Kelly Wisecup is assistant professor of English at Northwestern University, where she researches and teaches Native American and early American literatures, focusing especially on Native American writers’ and activists’ engagement with colonial science, archives, and genres. Her first book, Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (2013) explores how medical knowledge served as a form of communication among colonists, Native Americans, and African Americans, one in which people defined and defended their bodies as well as their relationship to the environment and to other than human beings. Her current book project, Assembled Relations: Compilation, Collection, and Native American Writing, investigates how Native American writers adapted forms of compilation and collection—herbals, vocabulary lists, museum inventories, catalogs, and commonplace books—to restore and remake environmental, epistemological, and interpersonal relations disrupted by colonialism. Her articles have appeared in Early American Literature, Early American Studies, Atlantic Studies, Studies in Travel Writing, Literature and Medicine, The Southern Literary Journal, and Literature Compass, and she has received fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Newberry Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Edith T. Baine Lecture will take place on October 24th at 4:30 p.m in the Barnard Observatory Tupelo Room. This event is free and open to the public.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/eng_lec/1011/thumbnail.jp

University Scholars Day

Presentation for the 2010 University Scholars Day at the University of North Texas discussing research the noble appeal and establishing truth in true reports from the early modern era

Bureaucracy: A Love Story - A Companion to the Exhibit at the University of North Texas Libraries Curated by Faculty and Students

Bureaucracy usually only becomes visible when it stops working—when a system fails, when an event gets off schedule, when someone points to a problem or glitch in a carefully calibrated workflow. But Bureaucracy: A Love Story draws together research done by scholars and students in the Special Collections at the University of North Texas to illuminate how bureaucracy structures our contemporary lives across a range of domains. People have navigated bureaucracy for centuries, by creating and utilizing various literary and rhetorical forms—from indexes to alphabetization to diagrams to blanks—that made it possible to efficiently process large amounts of information. Contemporary bureaucracy is likewise concerned with how to collect and store information, to circulate it efficiently, and to allow for easy access. We are interested both in the conventional definition of bureaucracy as a form of ordering and control connected to institutions and the state, but we also want to uncover how people interacted—often in creative ways—with the material forms of bureaucracy