Palmira Fontes da Costa

Research interests

• History of medicine and natural history (16th to 18th century);
• Historiography;
• History of the medical book;
• Visual representations of nature
• Science and gender;
• Monsters and other singularities of nature.

Projects

Participation

• “The medical art and Scientific intelligibility in the  Archipathology of Filipe Montalto”, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2013-present, PI: Adelino Cardoso.
• "The view of nature in the medico-philosophical tought at the transition from the XVIIth to the XVIIIth century", (PTDC/FIL-FCI/116843/2010). PI: Adelino Cardoso.
• "Philosophy, Medicine and Society", (PTDC/FIL/64863/2006). PI: Adelino Cardoso

Publications (selection)

1. Palmira Fontes da Costa (ed.), Medicine, Trade and Empire: Garcia de Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563) in Context (Fernham: Ashgate, 2015).
2. Palmira Fontes da Costa, “Identity and the Construction of Memory in Representations of Garcia de Orta”, Palmira Fontes da Costa (ed.), Medicine, Trade and Empire: Garcia de Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563) in Context (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 237 - 265.
3. Adelino Cardoso; Palmira Fontes da Costa (eds.), Botânica, Medicina e Cultura nos Colóquios de Garcia de Orta (Lisboa: Colibri, 2015).
4. Palmira Fontes da Costa, "Geographical Expansion and the Reconfiguration of Medical Authority: Garcia de Orta's Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563)", Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 43 (2012): 74-81.
5. Palmira Fontes da Costa, Adelino Cardoso (eds.), Percursos na História do Livro Médico, 1450-1800 (Lisboa: Colibri, 2011).
6. Palmira Fontes da Costa, "Secrecy, Ostentation and the Illustration of Exotic Animals in Sixteenth-Century Portugal", Annales of Science, 66 (2009), 59-83.
7. Palmira Fontes da Costa, The Singular and the Making of Knowledge at the Royal Society of London in the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).
8. Palmira Fontes da Costa, “Women and the Popularisation of Botany in Early Nineteenth-Century Portugal: The Marquesa de Alorna´s Botanical Recreations”, in Faidra Papanelopoulou, Agustí Nieto-Galan and Enrique Perdiguero (eds.), Popularisation of Science and Technology in the European Periphery (London: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 43-63.
9. Palmira Fontes da Costa, Henrique Leitão, “Portuguese Imperial Science: A Historiographical Review.”, in Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine (eds.), Science, Power and the Order of Nature in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 35-53.
10. Palmira Fontes da Costa, António Jesus, “António Ribeiro Sanches and the circulation of medical knowledge in eighteenth-century Europe”, Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences, 56 (2006): 185-197.
11. Palmira Fontes da Costa, “Mediating Sexual Difference: The Medical Understanding of Human Hermaphrodites in Eighteenth-Century England”, in Willem de Blécourt and Cornelie Usborne (eds.), Cultural Approaches to the History of Medicine. Mediating Medicine in Early Modern and Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 127-147.

Scientific Societies and other institutions

• British Society for the History of Science, since 1990.
• Sociedade Brasileira de Filosofia e História da Biologia: Founding Member.