Cynthia Klestinec, Associate professor at Miami University, Ohio, focuses her research on the history of science and medicine, the history of anatomy and dissection, and conceptions and bodily practices related to health in the early modern period. In particular, she works with sources and archives in Venice, Italy, where she recently co-curated, with Dr. Gabriele Matino, an exhibition on Art, Medicine and Faith in the Age of Tintoretto at the Scuola grande di San Marco (2018-2019).
Her current project uses the history of medical ethics in order to reconstruct the limits of medical intervention in early modern cases and the ways medical practitioners addressed ‘end of life’ and ‘quality of life’ concerns of their patients.
"As a particularly dramatic account in the early history of signs and sanctity, [the Chiara] episode highlighted the importance of context," writes Cynthia Klestinec in response to Sidney Castillo's interview with Gabor Klaniczay. There we see "how the local context of Chiara served to establish claims to sanctity in the early 1300s and how the more extensive context of the Counter Reformation generated an overlapping but ultimately different set of debates about those same signs in the 1650s."
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