Thesis defence Colonial Surgery in a Time of Medical Reform Wouter Schouten in the Dutch Golden Age Add to calendar 2025-12-05 14:30 2025-12-05 16:30 Europe/Rome Colonial Surgery in a Time of Medical Reform Sala del Torrino, Villa Salviati, and zoom YYYY-MM-DD Print Share: Share on Facebook Share on BlueSky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Send by email Scheduled dates Dec 05 2025 14:30 - 16:30 CET Sala del Torrino, Villa Salviati, and zoom Organised by Department of History PhD Thesis Defense by Jan Becker This thesis examines how the Dutch Republic’s colonial expansion reshaped the social world of early modern medicine through a microhistory of the life and writings of Wouter Schouten (1638–1704), a ship surgeon who served the Dutch East India Company before returning to his native city of Haarlem. In colonial settings, surgeons assumed tasks well beyond surgery’s theoretical bounds, stepping into roles of physicians and pharmacists alike. This practical colonial experience effectively rendered colonial surgeons as transversal medical practitioners and furnished returning surgeons, like Schouten, with new confidence to claim standing within the Republic’s civic and medical spheres. Back home, surgeons used print to translate colonial experience into civic and medical authority, challenging academic physicians’ efforts to regulate medicine in urban settings. Tracing the codification of colonial experiences and their instrumentalisation in regulatory claims for better medicine, this thesis focuses primarily on Schouten’s vast and diverse writings. These writings, and the role colonial surgeons played in urban medical politics more generally, unsettle standard historical narratives which frame the seventeenth century as an era of medical reform driven by Cartesian theory and university-trained physicians. Rather than seeking drivers of change within university settings and philosophical debate, this thesis focuses on those medical practitioners responsible for medical practice in the colonies, namely, surgeons. Medical practice in colonial settings, this thesis argues, became a key point of reference as surgeons constructed their medical authority and civic identity. Surgeons sought to shape medical practice in the Dutch Republic by promoting medical theories and regulatory institutional structures that served their self-perception as the drivers of colonial medicine. Register