Fever. Global Histories of (a) Disease, 1760-1830, by Stefanie Gänger
June 27, 2025, 14:00 Central European Time. Online via MS Teams.
The talk is concerned with the history of fever(s) in French, Iberian, and British empires, from the 1770s to the 1820s, a time in which it was widely considered the most common and fatal disease afflicting mankind. Emphasizing the historicity and cultural contingency of fever and the febrile experience, the presentation explores the period’s disease concept, that ailment’s unusual prevalence during those decades, sufferers’ sensory experience of it and the commonness of ‘sequelae’, that is, of fevers that left sufferers with longer-term damage to their health.
Stefanie GÄNGER is Professor of Modern History at the University of Heidelberg. She holds an MPhil and a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, after studying history at the Universities of Augsburg and Seville. Stefanie’s work considers the histories of science, collecting, and medicine. Her first book, Relics of the Past – on antiquarianism in nineteenth-century Andean South America – was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. Her second book, A Singular Remedy – a history of ‘the Peruvian bark’, a febrifuge, across the Atlantic world around 1800 – came out with Cambridge University Press in 2020.
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