Bust of Hippocrates; photo credit: Pixabay.
Last month, I spoke with a Laidlaw scholar about her introduction to the program, her experiences with faculty mentorship, and the topic she chose to research in her first summer. This month, we’ll be discussing her second summer with the program and the interdisciplinary nature of her work and the Laidlaw program as a whole.
Helen: In Summer 2, I was very interested in starting to research the classical concepts of the female body. I was interested in medicine, because it provides a space to talk about sociopolitical agendas as they intersect upon the female body and how texts work to construct ideals of gender. I started looking at the Hippocratic corpus and works on women in that corpus. One example is a text called Diseases of Young Girls. My mentor then introduced me to Soranus, who was a Greek gynecologist who wrote in the 2nd century AD. I became interested in looking at how Soranus conceptualizes the psyche. He allows for mental intervention into the reproductive process, which is dramatically different from the Hippocratics who focus on physiology rather than the female mind. Soranus’ work is fascinating to me because of the ways in which he speaks about the interactions between the physical and the mental, and how these interactions endow the female patient with agency in important ways. In my research project, I asked what Soranus’ conceptualization of the psyche’s intervention means for ideas of the female patient as agent. Agency in Greek medicine is often relegated to men; male patients can have agency, but female patients are objects.
Virginia: Both of your projects are very interdisciplinary, and you were able to bring in your interests in different fields. Did you find that the Laidlaw program was a good environment for doing something of that sort?
Helen: I think one of the most interesting parts of the program is that there’s a research cohort, especially in the first summer. You’re meeting every week and hearing about your peers’ topics. It’s mind-blowing to see how cool everyone is and how engaged they are with ideas that I could never conceptualize. That part of the program is steeped in its mission. I do think it’s because it’s a self-designed research program, at least in the humanities (I know some of my science peers were part of labs, so their work was more delineated by the lab’s agenda or the PI’s agenda). But in the humanities, it’s very self-directed. Really, your research abilities and your need to find any sort of lens to use for your project are the only barrier to entry. So, I would say that Laidlaw lets you be very interdisciplinary.