The walnut has a brain-like shape, and may therefore benefit the brain. Today, such claims are known as the ‘doctrine of signatures’, an idea that plants resembling human body parts can cure those body parts. Popular in herbalism today, the doctrine of signatures has a history that bifurcates into many temporalities. Anthropologists saw it as a primitive mentality, while historians saw it as premodern; physicians as pre-scientific, and structuralists as pre-linguistic. Philosopher Michel Foucault saw it as a Renaissance epistemology that ceased to be contemporary in seventeenth-century Europe, whereas Kanpō physician Tatsuno Kazuo saw it as a method that allowed medicine of the Japanese Empire to pick up where early modern Europe had left off and surpass medical modernity in the West. 

This talk analyses these entanglements through a reversed history spanning the nineteenth and late sixteenth centuries. A translocal history, it examines how the doctrine of signatures connected and commensurated natural knowledge across colonial Bombay, Enlightenment Edinburgh, Stuart Hereford, and post-Reformation Marburg, and how certain people, plants, and media made signatures relatable across boundaries. Merging history and historiography, it shows how the projected age of the doctrine of signatures accumulated iteratively: while later periods cast it as an increasingly ancient and primitive idea through an orientalist lens, seventeenth-century Europe practised and debated it as a new method for reforming natural knowledge in teaching and research. Doing away with the performative consistency of chronological narratives, it shows how the politics of dispersed, contingent ‘present’ moments have shaped their own pasts. Drawing on postcolonial histories, global histories of knowledge, and contemporary theoretical debates, it develops reversed history as a method to radically provincialise and historicise the dichotomies and boundaries that historians of science have implicitly deemed universal and eternal. 

Coffee/tea, cake and fruit will be served @ 2 pm.