Ph.D. candidate, history of science and science studies, UC San Diego
Kat White
Puerto de Acapulco en el Reino de la Nueva España en el Mar del Sur. Adrián Boot, 1628
Research
I am currently working on two projects. My dissertation research is a history of cutting and opening the body in sixteenth-century Spain, New Spain, and Italy, titled Medicine, Anatomy, and the Search for Natural Man in the Sixteenth-Century Iberian World. This is a labor history of the many practitioners and individuals that cut the body in Europe and the Spanish colonies; ecclesiastical, medical, ritual, and occult.
My second project is a cross-Atlantic history of red chalk (ochre, almagra, sanguine) earths, and medicinal clays in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Spain and Italy, for its use by artists, pharmacists, and medical practitioners in drawing the body, medicating ailments of the blood, and as a cosmetic for mimicking blush under the skin. In Mesoamerican cultures, to color architectural projects, in ritual burials, and to treat inflammation. This project asks how diverse uses of red minerals for treating, representing, or suppressing blood evolved in the early colonial period, asking questions on the relationship between materia medica and the growing preoccupation with blood purity and human variation in the Spanish Empire. This project is titled Drawing Out the Sickness.
I have conducted research for these projects at Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, Biblioteca Nacional de España and Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, Archivo General de Indias in Seville, the British Library and Wellcome Collection in London, Huntington Library, and Linda Hall Library.
This research has been supported by the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine; the Wenner-Gren Foundation; UC San Diego International Institute; UC San Diego Science Studies Program; UC San Diego History.
