Dominik Merdes

Department for the History of Pharmacy and Science,

Technische Universität Braunschweig

Biography:

Dominik Merdes studied pharmacy, literature, and the history of science. From 2015 until 2018, he performed doctoral research at TU Braunschweig under the supervision of Professor Bettina Wahrig. Besides his academic research, he worked in several community pharmacies, one of the places from which his critique unfolded. In his thesis titled ‘The Production of a Pharmacon—A Cartography of Kala-Azar and the Antimonials’, he explores the emergence of the disease kala-azar in Assam and of the antimonials, a group of drugs that were early products of modern chemotherapy. His cartographic analysis combines the concept of machinic assemblage by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with feminist and postcolonial theories. He argues that antimonials and modern chemotherapy are not essentially ‘European’, but the product of a type of machinic assemblage that comprises multiple agents and lives on the exploitation of peripheral spaces. In his main contribution to Materialities of Medical Culture in/between Europe and East Asia, he continues to inquire the construct of ‘tropical medicine’ and parasitological practices. In a second project, he studies the materialization of antimonials and arsenicals between different epistemological spaces in colonial contexts.