Holly Fletcher, who is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the ‘Sleeping Well’ Project at the University of Manchester, has been awarded a prestigious Wellcome Trust Early Career Award for her project ‘The Fats of Life in the Early Modern World, 1500-1750: Matter in Multispecies Medicine’. Holly will receive five years of funding to complete this research at UCL where she’ll be working with Dr Elaine Leong.
Holly’s project will be the first to examine the transformative impact of plant and animal fats within early modern medicine c. 1500-1750. In this period, fats became vital ingredients in a wide range of medical therapies, from healing wounds and burns to treating digestive issues and nervous disorders. This was also a time of expanding global connections; Holly’s project will trace the introduction and adaptation of new fats (such as whale and palm oil) within European medicine as a result of colonial encounters and burgeoning trade networks. She will thus reconstruct a global pharmacopeia of fats which, through distillation and as emollients, binders and emulsifiers, enabled the development of new remedies in a growing medical marketplace. In so doing, the project will produce a groundbreaking, earlier history of ‘multispecies medicine’ in which health is understood to be interdependent with nonhuman life. By uncovering the centrality of plant, animal and human fats for the treatment of animal and human bodies, this research significantly reshapes our understanding of early modern medicine, revealing its interspecies dependencies. Holly will combine textual analysis of English, German and Dutch sources with innovative remaking methodologies to investigate how the properties of different fats determined their medicinal uses, pioneering a matter-centred, ‘farm to table’ approach to medical therapeutics.