Paul Shin
A.B., Cornell University
I am an intellectual and cultural historian of early national/early republic US and the Atlantic world, particularly in the intersections between science and medicine ca. 1750-1850. At the moment, I focus on surgery in the US and the ways it shaped the intellectual, epistemological, and cultural milieu of American physicians (who, as I hope to show, often practiced surgery); and more particularly how the ‘hand-craft’ of surgery was both a positive and negative source of tension in the formation of a ‘modern’ American medical profession by the mid-19th century—before the rise of physiology and 'experimenta' sciences. Closely tied to this project is a meditation on how medical practice (and American culture generally) was shaped by a specific understanding of the ‘natural’—as opposed to the ‘normal’—a technical term that arose in mid-century Western medical thought. I draw broadly from methods in American Studies, Art History, Narrative medicine, Narrative history, Anthropology, and hope to incorporate visual (portraiture), material (anatomical specimens), and literary sources. More broadly, I am interested in the dialectic between the 'natural' and 'cultural' in US history. I am also a second/third year medical student, and see my work as part of a larger project of understanding how medical education and medical research shapes professional identity in ways positive and negative.
