I am interested in the histories of science and medicine across most periods and places. More precisely, I study practices and ideas of experimentation in science and medicine in Early Modern Europe, especially the Low Countries. My current project, Experimental Life: Science, Medicine, and Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Leiden, examines the emergence of experimental culture in Leiden in the mid-seventeenth century, and the surprisingly long legacy of some of that culture into the nineteenth century. Most broadly, I hope to recover some of the importance of medicine for the histories of experimentation and natural philosophy. I have also worked on the history of the sense of taste in chemical medicine, Cartesianisms, and violence and disgust in early modern culture.
