About this site

The author visiting an "art in medicine" special exhibit at the Charite Hospital's Medical History Museum, August 2023

Bodily Matters takes a cross-cultural approach to histories of health, ailment, and embodiment. The author prefers to show rather than tell their aims here over time. But in the meantime you can subscribe to receive emails when new posts or videos are uploaded.

About the author

SJ Zanolini is a PhD candidate in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to 2020, SJ also worked as a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Clinically and academically, they are interested in the connection between health routines and cultivated well-being, particularly for the management of chronic ailments or co-morbid conditions. This firsthand experience with the limitations of contemporary therapeutics in addressing population level-healthcare problems led SJ into the study of quotidian medical strategies, particularly with the aim of historicizing popular medical knowledge about dietetics. Their dissertation focuses on medicinal discourse about common foods such as porridge, sweet potatoes, ginger, mushrooms, and seaweed as a means of distinguishing everyday dietetic knowledge, including theorizations of taste physiology, and the contexts and limits of its usage contexts in early modern China.