This project explores how early modern physicians, naturalists, and artists conceptualized bladder, kidney, and gallstones as part of a wider world of metals and minerals. Known medically as “interior stones,” these concretions blurred the boundary between animate and inanimate matter: they formed within living bodies yet shared the material qualities of geological specimens. “Cures and Curiosities: Visualizing the Stone Disease” examines how such formations were depicted, classified, and exchanged across Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, revealing how mineralogical thinking extended into the realm of the pathological.
Within the framework of the Working Group “Metals, Minerals, and the Life Cycle,” the project situates bodily stones within the broader histories of provenance, use, and reuse that defined mineral knowledge. Like ores or salts extracted from the earth, interior stones underwent their own life cycles of discovery, extraction, and circulation. Physicians recorded their provenance through autopsy reports and correspondence networks; artisans and illustrators transformed them into epistemic images that could be reproduced, compared, and repurposed across contexts.
By analyzing hundreds of illustrations preserved in medical treatises, museum collections, archives, and journals, including the Miscellanea Curiosa and Philosophical Transactions, this project investigates how the material and visual study of these stones shaped understandings of growth, transformation, and curative interventions. In doing so, it brings pathological matter into conversation with the histories of metals and minerals, emphasizing the reciprocity between geological and corporeal processes in the making of early modern science.