Introduction: the crafting of medicine in the early industrial age

The special issue "Fitting for Health" offers a critical inquiry into the co-construction of medicine and technology in the early industrial age. It investigates the "social life" of medical things, through their material configuration, invention, improvement, and diversification, the sites of their deployment, their status as both novelties and less spectacular objects of everyday use, and the challenges they faced in fitting themselves into people's lives and European res publica. The set of articles (on steel trusses, medical electricity, anatomical models, and trade catalogs) heuristically uses "technology" to analyze how medicine and its material processes were crafted, endowed with meaning, and woven into European societies. Opening the medical "black box"—circumventing its tendency to be ignored as a mediating tool—provides a significant common point of entry for the four enquiries, triggering further analysis of the relationship between humans and non-humans as shaped in medical knowledge and practice.