What We're Reading
Kristie Patricia Flannery, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, The Australian Catholic University
Medicine at sea: Sixteenth-century medical care aboard the Manila galleon
Ruiz-Stovel, Guillermo, Carlos González Balderas, and Angela Schottenhammer, “The Case of Agustín Sánchez: an Interactive Online Resource—A Late Sixteenth-Century Spanish Surgeon Crossing the Pacific Ocean”. Designed by Peter Färberböck and Stefan Schwaiger. Crossroads Research Centre, 2022,
A team of historians at KU Leuven has launched an excellent new digital history resource that examines the history of medical care aboard the Spanish galleon ships that crossed the Pacific Ocean between Acapulco in Mexico and Manila in the Philippines in the late sixteenth century.
Using a microhistorical methodology, this resource focuses on Agustín Sánchez, the Spanish “barber-surgeon” who sailed on the San Martín galleon in 1587. Unfortunately for Sánchez, he did not survive this long oceanic crossing, and his death at sea led to the creation of an archive including an inventory of his property, which encompassed drugs and medical books, as well as his clothing and weapons. Analyzing these materials sheds light on ideas about health and healthcare at sea in this first age of globalization.
The Case of Agustín Sánchez is an excellent online resource for researchers, teachers, and students. The website includes short, fifteen-minute podcasts and short articles on these topics in global and early modern history. In addition, it features transcribed primary sources, including a searchable table of Sánchez’s personal and professional belongings with photographs that help modern readers to understand some of the strange objects in the doctor’s kit, such as buffalo horns and fancy red stockings.
Joseph Satish, University of Hyderabad
Kulyash Zhumadilova, "Epistemic violence in STEM textbooks: A Feminist critique of biostatistics", 4S Backchannels
The author raises the issue of epistemic violence in STEM textbooks. The case of a Biostatistics textbook that features a disproportionate number of problems on breast cancer, which contain normative assumptions about women's bodies and reproductive choices, is examined critically.
P Sainath, "When Bhabani Mahato fed the revolution", People's Archive of Rural India
The author talks to a little known 97 year old woman and her struggles before, during and after the Indian freedom struggle.
Ilana Webster-Kogen,"The astonishing life and music of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, the Ethiopian nun who’s died at 99", The Conversation
The writer discusses the legacy of the classically trained Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou who was associated with the jazz genre and spent her life in a convent, providing a mix of several identities: a female instrumentalist, a religious composer of secular music and an ascetic.
Zaib un Nisa Aziz, University of South Florida
Sheila S. Coronel, Rewriting the History of the Marcos Years, London Review of Books, March 30, 2023
Almost four decades after the brutal regime of Ferdinand Marcos fell in the Philippines, his son and namesake has won another election. Sheila S. Cornell reflects on how this came to be and the critical role historical distortion has played in rehabilitating the Marcos brand.
Tariq Baconi, Enforcing Apartheid in the West Bank, New York Review of Books, February 27, 2023
Last month, hundreds of Israeli armed settlers raided Huwara, a village south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank. Baconi reports, arguing that armed settlers such as these are Zionism's contemporary pioneers.
Daniel Finn, Two Centuries of the National Question, Jacobin, Feb 15, 2023
The global rise of the nation-states is a one of the most transformative processes in modern history. Daniel Finn discusses how Marxists have tackled nations and nationalism over generations.