International Workshop: Medicine as a Medium of Multiple Modernities

Wissenschaftliche Vorbereitung: Heiner Fangerau (Ulm), Alfons Labisch ML (Düsseldorf), Christian Oberländer (Halle/Saale)

Medicine focuses on the most recent scientific findings and techniques while at the same time it is a practice deeply interwoven in the everyday live of people. Thus medicine can serve as a medium that mirrors on one hand, complex scientific, technical as well as economic processes and on the other hand, adaptation to these social processes in the everyday lives of people. From the perspective of globalization, it is the aim of this project to explore and create knowledge to understand current issues of globalization by examining processes of modernization through the focus of medicine. This specific approach promises valuable insights when processes of globalization and modernization are examined in different countries, regions, institutions or disciplines. For the purpose of comparison, the regions of Europe and East Asia will be selected. However, historical comparison is not the research goal in itself but only a heuristic instrument. Germany, Japan and China will be at the centre of attention because modernization in these three countries occurred in different periods while being in a key relationship of interdependence when transferring modern medicine from Europe to East Asia and within Asia. With the selection of these two regions and three countries, the diverse exchange and transaction of ideas between Europe and Asia in different areas of knowledge and activity will be the focus of investigations. In terms of historical periods, investigations will concentrate on the time of the introduction of modern scientific medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The concept of 'multiple modernities' by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt is the theoretical approach of this project. It allows to explain processes of modernization by looking at contingent historical events and thereby to capture the environment and the intentions of historical actors - it is, as Wolfgang Knöbl says - "contingency sensitive". The idealtypischen constructs of certain ‘levels’ or ‘zones’ of modernity proposed by Eisenstadt are far from real social configurations or even historical detail. However, this project will contribute right here by studying historical transfer processes.