IMC 2026: Sessions

This session represents the first of four proposed sponsored sessions that focus on the various temporalities of health, healing and disease in medieval medicine. This session offers three papers that each examine one aspect of how time or temporal healing boundaries were created and how they impacted the treatment of patients. ‘Temporality in the Huangdi Neijing and Medieval Traditions of Care’ examines how a key medical text circulated and commented upon in the medieval Chinese period theorizes healing as a temporal process bound to cosmic rhythms. The second paper, ‘The Temporality of the Ill or Injured Body in Late-Medieval Medical Diagrams’, offers iconographic evidence that medieval practitioners saw an ill or injured body as a temporary state, separate to that of a healthy body that existed in normal time. The third paper, ‘Time, Venom and Treatment: Two Cases of Rabies Treatment in Later Medieval Paris,’ details the importance of time frames related to the introduction of rabies into a human body and the latency between bite and rabies encephalitis, and how that impacted the treatment of those infected.