The performance of surgery in enlightenment France

During the 18th century, the reinvention of French surgery as a ‘monarchical profession’, in the words of Toby Gelfand, enabled the creation of an elite surgical knowledge from which uninstructed participants could be excluded. A link can be made between the types of resources used by surgeons to present themselves as expert healers, and the epistemological strategies of the operation. The sickbed was the scene of a performance, in which every actor's movements were described and constrained; the end product of an extended process of social negotiation, surgical training, physical restraint and submission.     

Food of paradise: Tahitian breadfruit and the autocritique of European consumption

In many ways, Tahiti was central to European colonialism, for it was there that European visitors forged a model of primitive nature that served as a comparison to, and sometimes critique of, European civilization. Tahiti was also the place from which a unique plant, the breadfruit, was brought to European colonies and to England and France during the late 18th century, at the behest of naturalists. With the breadfruit travelled contrasting perceptions of the Tahitian way of life. The autocritique of European lifestyles and the naturalization of the breadfruit are closely intertwined. The breadfruit indeed became a radical food of the end of the 18th century.