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The Material Turn in the History of Life Science
Author(s) -
Guerrini Anita
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/lic3.12325
Subject(s) - historiography , variety (cybernetics) , history of science , natural history , aesthetics , focus (optics) , movement (music) , natural (archaeology) , history , life history , human body , human culture , epistemology , literature , art , philosophy , sociology , anthropology , medicine , computer science , biology , anatomy , archaeology , artificial intelligence , ecology , physics , optics
The “material turn” or the history of things has become a prominent focus in the history of life science of the long eighteenth century. The reassessment of eighteenth‐century science since the 1990s has given particular prominence to medicine and the life sciences. Eighteenth‐century anatomists and naturalists studied, collected, imitated, and represented many kinds of natural things, from the human body to trees. This article considers a variety of new approaches to material culture, museums, and collecting among historians of science since 2000, focusing on natural history and anatomy. The historiography of objects invokes a sensory history of seeing and touching, and a global history of movement across time, place, and culture.