The Medicine Chest

Disciplines exercise certain constraints on the objects they study – an effect of undergraduate curricula, discipline-specific taxonomies, and research processes. This website showcases one such object – a small medicine chest housed in the Manuscripts and Archives (M&A) Department of the University of Cape Town. The chest has been rendered invisible in this facility because it exhibits characteristics that fall outside of those privileged by the library’s categorisation system and its search engines. The site addresses this blind spot through incorporating a wide range of novel metadata generated when this object intersected with a range of external disciplines also practiced in this institution. It demonstrates its newfound applicability to these fields, hinting at novel connections waiting to be explored. This site forms part of my larger doctoral research project titled, The virus and the vaccine: Curatorship and the disciplinary outsider (2021).