Patrick Singy

• Sadism at the Limits: Sex, Violence, and the Historical Boundaries of Sexuality (monograph)
  

• Abus de soi et "usage des femmes" au dix-huitième siècle. Les pratiques sexuelles des correspondants de Samuel Auguste Tissot (edition of selected letters to Tissot, with extensive introduction. Under contract with Editions BHMS, Lausanne)
  

Ce livre est divisé en deux parties. La première, proprement historique et historiographique, fait d’abord le point sur les travaux historiques sur la sexualité au dix-huitième siècle, et montre ensuite en quoi la nouvelle perspective rendue possible par l’étude des lettres à Tissot doit modifier profondément notre compréhension de l’histoire de la sexualité. Dans la deuxième partie sont rassemblées les lettres les plus intéressantes sur le sujet de la sexualité. Ainsi le lecteur pourra avoir accès lui-même à cette source historique exceptionnelle. 

• Embodied: Space, Time, and the Emergence of Modern Medicine  (monograph)
  

Traditionally, scholars have argued that the emergence of clinical medicine in late eighteenth-century France was the outcome of the rise of physical examination, which itself was possible when physicians overcame cultural taboos against touching bodies.  Questioning this interpretation empirically as well as methodologically, I historicize both the patient’s diseased body and the physician’s experience of perception. My project shows how the shift in medical practice that took place between 1750 and 1850 was not located in the physicians’ putative acknowledgment of the body, but in a new conceptualization of disease and a new way of looking at, touching and listening to the body. While my general approach is reminiscent of Foucault's in Birth of the Clinic, the specific historical conclusions I reach are significantly different.  

Embodied concentrates on four medical practices, chosen both for their historical importance and for strategic reasons: consultation by letter, the taking of the pulse, percussion of the chest and pathological anatomy.  Current scholarship takes consultation by letter as a symbol of Ancient Regime medicine because of the absence of any direct physical contact between patient and doctor; it assumes that the taking of the pulse has not undergone any dramatic change between 1750 and 1850; and it sees in both percussion of the chest and pathological anatomy the first steps in the emergence of modern medicine.  By giving a new interpretation of the history of each of these practices, Embodied offers an original understanding of the emergence of modern medicine as a whole.

• “Medicine and the Senses” (book chapter, to be included in vol. 4 ("The Enlightenment") of A Cultural History of the Senses. Edited by Anne Vila)

• “Introduction: What Do We Want Epistemological History to Be?” (short introduction, co-authored with Matthew L. Jones)
  

In this introduction to our edited volume, Beyond Cause and Meaning: Essays on Epistemological History (see below), Matt Jones and I will describe the main characteristics of a historiographical tradition that has its roots in the work of Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Michel Foucault, and that has been developed more recently by scholars such as Lorraine Daston, Arnold Davidson, and Ian Hacking.

• “Writing History With a Saw” (book chapter)
  

In this polemical essay I defend the use of discontinuity as a historiographical tool. I distinguish between "chronological discontinuity," which necessarily raises the thorny issue of periodization, and "epistemological discontinuity," which is only secondarily related to the temporal dimension of history.  I argue that most of the attacks that have been launched against the idea of discontinuity stem from a confusion between these two types of discontinuity. I then describe some of the specific narrative and philosophical characteristics of histories organized by the concept of discontinuity. 

This essay will be published in the volume I am co-editing with Matt Jones, Beyond Cause and Meaning: Essays on Epistemological History (see below).

• Beyond Cause and Meaning: Essays on Epistemological History (edited volume, with Matthew L. Jones)
  

For several decades social and cultural historians of science have been working to debunk the old myths of Whiggish history. Without a doubt, they have been successful. Whether considering Robert Boyle’s air-pump or today’s laboratories, numerous case studies have shown that science cannot be reduced to a universally valid method or practical norms. The most assiduous observers, like the most recluse theorists, are sometimes driven by less-than-rational interests, and science as a whole is a culture like any other, with its own procedures, etiquettes, and polities.

For all its innovations, the social and cultural study of science has created or reinforced a series of assumptions that have often solidified into historiographical habits:

            1) The assumption that causality governs history, and the concomitant disciplinary rule that historians must always subordinate the task of description to the task of causal explanation.

            2) The assumption that the true reality of any scientific activity lies in the details of local practice, and the methodological correlate that historical understanding improves in proportion to the narrowness of the historian’s gaze.

            3) The assumption that history is necessarily continuous, and the hope that the devout frequentation of archives will smooth the asperities of time and seamlessly connect the chains of precursors.

            4) The assumption, rooted in a vague form of humanism, that human beings are always, ultimately, the explanans of history (and sometimes its explanandum as well), with the clear implication that historians must first and foremost pay attention to flesh-and-blood scientists, lest they produce studies that are flawed, uninteresting, or overly abstract.

The essays collected in Beyond Cause and Meaning describe, debate about, and embody an approach to the history of science that is primarily descriptive, voluntarily global, profoundly discontinuous, and unapologetically antihumanist -- an approach sometimes called historical epistemology or historical meta-epistemology. What can such an approach reveal that traditional social and cultural history leaves aside?  What are the stakes – historiographical and philosophical – of this approach? Can such an approach overcome the limitations of local history of science without reifying some universal rationality? How does this approach evade the problems inherent to alternate approaches in the history of science and traditional intellectual history?  

This book will include historiographical essays by Lorraine Daston, Arnold Davidson, Claude-Olivier Doron, Peter Galison, Philippe Huneman, Matthew L. Jones, Kevin Lamb, Paolo Savoia, and myself.  

• “Forensic Psychiatry and the Misuse of the DSM” (book chapter, to be included in Contemporary Essays in the Philosophy of Medicine. Edited by P.Huneman, G. Lambert, and M. Silberstein. Springer, forthcoming 2012)

• “Thinking Straight About Perversion” (book chapter, to be included in The Psychiatric Babel: Assessing the DSM-5, edited by Steeves Demazeux and Patrick Singy)