Pamela Mackenzie is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department Artifacts, Action, Knowledge at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her research examines intersections of visual culture, materiality, and medicine in early modern Europe. Her current project, “Cures and Curiosities: Visualizing the Stone Disease,” traces how urinary and other “interior stones” were depicted, classified, and exchanged in medical and mineralogical contexts between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through analysis of illustrated manuscripts, printed treatises, and surviving specimens, the project reconstructs how physicians and artists visualized the body’s mineral formations and grappled with their ambiguous status between the organic and the geological.
Pamela completed her PhD in Art History at the University of British Columbia while holding predoctoral positions at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, where her project explored the visual cultures of early microscopy and plant anatomy. Her broader research and curatorial work investigate the material and representational practices that connect art, science, and natural history. Before joining the MPIWG, she held a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral research fellowship at the History and Philosophy of Science department at Cambridge University.
