[Sci-tech-public] MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History, March 23, 2012

[Margo Collett]

MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History

 

“Earthsickness: Circumnavigation and the Terrestrial Human Body, 1520-1800”



Joyce Chaplin

Department of History, Harvard University

 
From the 1500s into the early 1800s, most of the mariners who tried to go around the world died, mostly of scurvy.  Commentary on their suffering represented a meaningful event in the conceptualization of the human body as the planetary entity: circumnavigation offered their scorbutic bodies as evidence that humans were terrestrial creatures, physically suited to the earthly parts of a terraqueous globe.

Friday, March 23, 2012

2:30 – 4:30 PM

Building E51-095

Corner of Amherst and Wadsworth Streets, Cambridge



Sponsored by the MIT History Faculty and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society.  Contact mcollett at mit.edu for more information or to be put on the mailing list.
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