Madeleine Sheahan

Madeleine is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University in the department for the History of Science and Medicine and combined degree program in Early Modern Studies. Her training is grounded in the interdisciplinary study of early modern history from the perspective of the history of medicine and science, women and gender history, and material culture. Madeleine’s research focuses on domestic medicine during the long seventeenth century, examining the use of animal and human derived medical ingredients in English manuscript recipe books. She is particularly interested in how and why recipe writers claimed the therapeutic benefits of using live animals in medical preparations and subjected them to particularly violent and painful deaths in order to capture vitality of their bodies. Her research ultimately aims to expose the material practices, epistemology, and ecological implications of this work that violently transformed once-living beings into useful household remedies. 

 

Madeleine is originally from Toronto, Canada. There, she completed her B.A. in Renaissance Studies from the University of Toronto, as well as her M.A. at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, at the University of Toronto.