Sichi Early Career Professor and Associate Professor

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and French and Francophone Studies

(Spring 2026)

While scholars have long studied how the rise of Western medicine went hand in hand with an abstraction of the patient and a glorification of normative bodies, these studies have tended to focus on the doctors and surgeons practicing medicine in an official capacity, as well as the centralized sites in which they practiced. Careful Science turns instead to practices of care and healing that take place outside of hospitals and clinics. This project provides a new ontology of ability – one that accounts for the nuances of various human bodies. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as the medical field began to codify around a set of practices learned in academic and clinical settings, the knowledge of midwives, religious and tribal healers, and charitable nuns (based largely on tradition and experience) grew suspect until they were almost entirely eradicated. The goals of Careful Science are threefold: first, I show how caretakers and healers (historically most often women, immigrants, and racial minorities) were systematically erased from the scenes of healthcare with the move toward a clinical medical practice. Second, I uncover certain methods that were lost with the move to a medical practice aimed at the isolation and cure of disease and restoration of normative bodies. And finally, I show how the clinical medical model that emerged during the Enlightenment continues to shape our views of health and disability to this day, and how our views on these topics might differ if we return to the roots of caretaking that predate modern medicine. Ultimately, I argue that reexamining these lost practices provides us with a more holistic approach to healing and might even redefine our notions of, and approaches to, disability.