Rob Boddice spoke on ‘Experiencing Placebo: Toward a Biocultural History of the Brain’ at this research seminar run as part of the ‘Emotions, history and the Body’ research seminar series.
Webinar Abstract
The puzzle of placebo is increasingly understood, but it has no history to speak of. Those who have attempted to write it have repeatedly announced the history of folk cures for painful problems, especially in the era before ‘scientific medicine’, to be ‘bizarre’. What happens when we take seriously the functioning of the biocultural brain in past contexts, accounting for situated beliefs, emotions, perceptions, sensations, conceptions and knowledge? Here I aim simply to suggest a framework for studying the history of the placebo effect, displacing attention from the inert medicament to the brain-body-world dynamic in which it was administered. Projecting neuroscientific work on placebo into the past, I suggest we can reach an understanding of the history of pain and pain relief not only through analgesics and anaesthesia, but also through belief, ritual, and hope.
Rob Boddice (PhD York, FRHistS) is Senior Researcher at the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence in the History of Experiences, Tampere University, Finland. Boddice has published extensively in the history of medicine, the history of science and the history of emotions. His recent books include The History of Emotions (Manchester University Press, 2018), A History of Feelings (Reaktion, 2019), Emotion, Sense, Experience, with Mark Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Humane Professions: The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Feeling Dis-Ease in Modern History: Experiencing Medicine and Illness (Bloomsbury), edited with Bettina Hitzer, will be published in 2022.He is currently writing Knowing Pain: A History of Sensation, Emotion and Experience (Polity, 2022).
The histories of emotion and the body are core concerns of AboutFace: The Cultural and Affective History of Face Transplants. They are also increasingly important themes in all fields of historical research, including the histories of medicine, ethics and gender. AboutFace is delighted to hold a monthly webinar series that explores emotion, history and the body across times and cultures, bringing together insights from the humanities and the social sciences. ‘Emotions, History and the Body’ therefore adopts a historical but interdisciplinary focus.
