Collaborations lead to IAS grant for HSTM and Wangensteen Wangensteen Historical Library

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (December 2024) — Wangensteen Historical Library Curator Lois Hendrickson, Assistant Curator Emily Beck and Associate Professor Wayne Soon received Research and Creative Collaboratives funding from the University of Minnesota's Institute of Advanced Studies this past fall for their project titled “Globalizing Medical History through East Asian Materials in Special Collections." The funding will help them to hire a language specialist to translate materials in the early modern Japanese and Chinese medical collection that is held at the Wangensteen library, advancing the global studies of medical history at the University of Minnesota. Read the project summary below. 

Globalizing Medical History through East Asian Materials in Special Collections

The history of modern science and medicine has tended to be written and taught as fundamentally Western. In reality, the development of medical practices were global in the early modern and modern period, with western intellectuals drawing on Asian medical practices, and East Asian physicians grappling with Dutch, Jesuit, Chinese, and Western medicine in configuring their medical practices. In an effort to enable the teaching and research of a more global history of health at the University of Minnesota, this Collaborative aims to make the numerous East Asian medical sources at the Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine (WHL) more accessible to members of the University of Minnesota academic and medical community as well as interested members of the public. 

Funding received will allow the team to hire a language specialist to translate representative sections of WHL East Asian collection materials, to facilitate the creation of a community of U of M and local faculty and instructors to ideate how to use the materials in instruction, and to host a pop-up exhibition to create public awareness of the materials.

• Wayne Soon, Program in the History of Medicine, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
• Emily Beck, Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
• Lois Hendrickson, Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, University of Minnesota Twin Cities