We are excited to announce the workshop “Fever: Histories of (a) Disease, c. 1750-1840”, which will take place on 10-11 July 2025 at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Hosted by the ERC CoG Project FEVER based at Heidelberg University, this workshop seeks to bring together historians interested in fever(s), widely considered the period’s most common and fatal ailment, in societies within or tied to the Atlantic world.
While ‘fever’ is, in some sense, a universal aspect of human sickness, that concept’s meaning, experience, and implications varied significantly across different historical contexts. Our interest is in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth century’s taxonomies of fever, in the diagnostic repertoire of experts and laypersons prior to the advent of thermometry, but also in the sensory experiences, emotional registers, and environmental anxieties that fevers would often entail. Our inquiry into the histories of fever might also raise questions about the racialization of fever in imperial contexts, the disease category’s translation between different medical cultures, and fever’s dual role as both an epidemic and a quotidian ailment, to mention but a few possibilities. We seek to understand fever's history across a broad geographical range, from typhus outbreaks in British workhouses to the tertian fevers that plagued viceregal Lima.
We invite paper proposals related to the conference’s thematic focus on fever in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Areas of interest include the history of medicine, science, and technology, as well as material, environmental, social, or religious histories of fever. Please submit an abstract (200-250 words) and a brief academic biography by 15 December 2024 to fever.project@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de. We will cover participants’ travel expenses (economy airfare or second-class train tickets) and provide one night's accommodation near the conference venue. We look forward to welcoming you and engaging in inspiring discussions in Heidelberg.