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Cynthia Klestinec

Education

• Ph.D. Comparative Literature, University of Chicago (2001)
• M.A. Comparative Literature, University of Chicago (1995)
• B.A. Comparative Literature, University of Georgia (1994)

Teaching Interests

• Renaissance Literature
• Scientific Revolution
• Medicine and Literature
• Representations of Health
• The History of the Book

Research Interests

• Renaissance anatomy and dissection
• The history of medical specialties and medical professions, including surgery
• The Scientific Revolution
• Histories of the body (sex and gender)

Selected Publications

Books:

• Miracles and Medicine in the Age of Tintoretto (an exhibition in the Scuola grande di San Marco, Venice, opening September 2018), exhibition catalogue, co-curated with Gabriele Matino, in progress 
• Professors, Physicians and Practices in the History of Medicine: Essays in Honor of Nancy Siraisi, eds. C. Klestinec and G. Manning (New York: Springer, 2017).
• Theaters of Anatomy: Students, Teachers, and Traditions of Dissection in Renaissance Venice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

Journals, Special Issue

• Renaissance Surgery: Between Learning and Craft, eds. C. Klestinec and D. Bertoloni Meli, special issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 72, no. 1 (2016). 

Articles:

• “The Anatomy Theater: Towards a Performative History” in Scientiae, eds. F. Baldassarri and F. Zampieri (Rome: L’Erma, 2021), 69-88.
•  “Religion, Stigmata, and History”, a blog entry that serves as commentary to a podcast by Gabor Klaniczay, Doctors and Stigmatics in the 19th and 20th centuries.
• “Vesalius among the Surgeons” in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, special issue, Valeria Finucci, ed., in press
• “Translating Learned Surgery” in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 72, no. 1 (2017): 34-50.
• “Touch, Trust, and Compliance in Early Modern Medical Practice” in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, Anne Whitehead, Angela Woods, Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton and Jennifer Richards, eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
• “Renaissance Surgeons: Anatomy, Manual Skill and the Visual Arts” in Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy, P. Distelzweig, B. Goldberg, and E. Ragland, eds. (New York: Springer, 2016), 43-58.
• “Sex, Medicine, and Disease: Welcoming Wombs and Vernacular Anatomies” in A Cultural History of Sexuality: the Renaissance, Bette Talvacchia, ed. (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2011), 113-136.
• “Practical Experience in Anatomy” in The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, Ofer Gal, Charles T. Wolfe, eds. (Sydney: Springer, 2010), 33-58. 
• “Civility, Comportment, and the Anatomy Theater: Girolamo Fabrici and His Medical Students in Renaissance Padua,” Renaissance Quarterly (July 2007): 434-463.
• “A History of Anatomy Theaters in Sixteenth-Century Padua,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 59, no. 3 (2004): 375-412.

Grants and Awards

2019

• Senior Visiting Scholar in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, University of Venice, Ca-Foscari, a research appointment

2017

• American Philosophical Society, Franklin Research Grant: summer research
• VeniceGladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Research in Venice

2012-2013

• Committee on Faculty Research (CFR) grant to promote research: May 2013

2007-2008

• Villa i Tatti Fellowship, Harvard University, September 2007-June 2008
• American Council of Learned Societies, Fellowship, September 2007-July 2008

2003-2006

• Boston Countway Library of Medicine, Fellowship, December 2005, May-June 2006
• NEH Summer Stipend, May-August, 2005
• Francis Bacon Fellow, Huntington Library, June-August, 2005
• Renaissance Society of America, travel grant, May 2005
• Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Research in Venice, May-June, 2004

Work in Progress

Klestinec's new research develops in two directions. The first direction, which focuses on the history of surgery, examines the interplay in the late Renaissance of a conception of the body as solid, with structures, surfaces and boundaries that could be manipulated by practitioners, especially surgeons. Physicians for centuries had emphasized the four humors—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood—and the matter theory that related these humors to the four qualities of hot, cold, wet and dry. Yet, for many Renaissance practitioners—educated surgeons, barbers and the makers of cosmetics, wigs, and prosthetics of all kinds—the body was perceived as a solid one, prompting theoretical and practical questions about how the health of the body should be restored by manipulating the body’s structures and surfaces, not its internal humoral balance. In a series of articles, published and forthcoming, she explores the 'solidifying body' or languages of 'making' the body in the early modern period as a consequence of several interrelated forces: the alliances between medical practitioners and artisans, the anatomical culture of the period, and the medical marketplace.

The second direction of new research focuses on the early history of palliative care and the idea of a good death. Traditional histories of death have long centered on and exalted the role of clergymen. Physicians, however, established their role at the deathbed long before the eighteenth century, the point at which traditional histories of death begin citing their prominence. By the late sixteenth century, not only had they developed remedies for physical suffering, as historians of medicine have shown, but they also provided medicina mentis, a medicine of the mind, to their dying patients. This project addresses the conflict between medical practitioners and religious advisors as it reconstructs this early history of palliative care at the intersection of philosophy, moral psychology, and medicine. It will focus on the writings of physicians in the tradition of ars moriendi as well as medical texts, coordinating that literature with documentation of physicians’ practices at the deathbed, in order to show how physicians, not priests, became fundamental to the ‘good death.’