Project description DEENESFRITPL Using 18th century electrotherapy data to learn more about scientific knowledge Science is subjective and situational. It is shaped by experiences and cognitive perceptions, which are themselves affected by circumstances, knowledge, and beliefs. Being cutting-edge and meticulously recorded at the time, 18th century electrotherapy data offers a unique way of understanding these interactions and how they impacted scientific knowledge. The ERC-funded ELBOW project is an empirical study of how direct experience, cognitive perceptions, experiential knowledge, and the epistemological beliefs of ordinary patients impacted electrotherapeutic practices and scientific knowledge as a whole. In doing so, the project will offer a more complex and enlightened approach to the history of knowledge. Show the project objective Hide the project objective Objective Scientific knowledge has long been understood to be subjective and situated. ELBOW examines this situatedness from a previously unexplored historical viewpoint by investigating the role of lay embodied experiences in eighteenth-century scientific knowledge construction. The project starts from the premise that knowledge is necessarily filtered through individuals’ embodied cognition and therefore tactile, sensory, and experiential. Using eighteenth-century medical electricity as an empirical case study, the project analyses how patients’ embodied and experiential knowledge influenced the medical knowledge emerging from electrotherapies, as well as whose experiences and ways of knowing ended up contributing to scientific knowledge. As a novel experimental therapy, medical electricity provides an exceptional window into practices of knowledge construction, authorisation, and marginalisation. Since electrical treatments and the bodily sensations they created were meticulously recorded by doctors and patients alike, these descriptions can be analysed as repositories of experiences and understandings of embodiment as well as epistemological beliefs regarding body, life, and matter. Medical electricity offers the perfect vantage point for examining popular epistemological understandings, their interaction with scientific epistemologies, and the way they manifested themselves in electrotherapeutic practices. ELBOW devises an innovative methodological approach to tease out patients’ embodied experiences and epistemological beliefs from a variety of sources, including scientific treatises, doctors’ casebooks, advertisements, fiction, and ego-documents. Combining phenomenology and cognitive science with history of medicine methods, the project proposes a new, theoretically sophisticated approach to analysing historical everyday experiences and embodied knowledge—and thereby a turn towards a new experiential paradigm in history of knowledge. Fields of science humanitiesphilosophy, ethics and religionphilosophyepistemologyhumanitieshistory and archaeologyhistorysocial sciencespsychologycognitive psychology Keywords Medical electricity history of knowledge gender and embodiment eighteenth-century Europe and Atlantic world Programme(s) HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme Topic(s) ERC-2021-STG - ERC STARTING GRANTS Call for proposal ERC-2021-STG See other projects for this call Funding Scheme HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants Host institution HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO Net EU contribution € 1 499 775,00 Address YLIOPISTONKATU 3 00014 Helsingin Yliopisto Finland See on map Region Manner-Suomi Helsinki-Uusimaa Helsinki-Uusimaa Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Participation in EU R&I programmes Opens in new window HORIZON collaboration network Opens in new window Total cost € 1 499 775,00 Beneficiaries (1) Sort alphabetically Sort by Net EU contribution Expand all Collapse all HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO Finland Net EU contribution € 1 499 775,00 Address YLIOPISTONKATU 3 00014 Helsingin Yliopisto See on map Region Manner-Suomi Helsinki-Uusimaa Helsinki-Uusimaa Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Participation in EU R&I programmes Opens in new window HORIZON collaboration network Opens in new window Total cost € 1 499 775,00
