scholarly journals The Making of Evident Expertise: Transforming Chemical Analytical Methods into Judicial Evidence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus B. Carrier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Analytical Methods ◽  
Forensic Toxicology ◽  
Standard Methods ◽  
Forensic Expertise ◽  
Visual Aid ◽  
History Of ◽  
Actual Material ◽  
Chemical Knowledge ◽  
Explicit Comparison

AbstractThis article investigates the question of how forensic toxicologists established the credibility of chemical analytical methods in poisoning lawsuits in the nineteenth century. After encountering the problem of laypersons in court, forensic toxicologists attempted to find strategies to make their evidence compelling to an untrained audience. Three of these strategies are discussed here: redundancy, standard methods, and intuitive comprehensibility. Whereas redundancy was not very practical and legally prescribed standard methods were not very popular with most forensic toxicologists, intuitive comprehensibility proved effective and popular. This strategy relied on employing methods which did not require chemical knowledge to be understandable. The methods aimed to generate a visual aid and to be obvious in their results. Two forms of this strategy are discussed here: the presentation of the actual material and explicit comparison. I argue that this shift towards presenting forensic toxicology expertise as evident represents an important step in the history of forensic expertise.

A Composite Portrait of a True American Philosophy on Magnanimity

2019 ◽  
pp. 235-265
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Corsa ◽  
Eric Schliesser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Natural World ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Standard Methods ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Characteristic Features

This chapter offers a composite portrait of the concept of magnanimity in nineteenth-century America, focusing on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. A composite portrait, as a method in the history of philosophy, is designed to bring out characteristic features of a group’s philosophizing in order to illuminate features that may still resonate in today’s philosophy. Compared to more standard methods in the historiography of philosophy, the construction of a composite portrait de-privileges the views of individual authors. These American philosophers saw the virtue of magnanimity as a remedy for a number of modern ills. They suggest that the best sort of magnanimity is acquired by adopting the correct relation to the natural world, including new forms of inquiry, or by adopting a life of voluntary poverty. Magnanimous individuals are critics of capitalism and offer themselves as exemplars of a better, experimental life.

scholarly journals Poisoning Crimes and Forensic Toxicology Since the 18th Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-46
Author(s):  
Katherine D. Watson
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Forensic Toxicology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Crime Statistics ◽  
Unique Type ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Forensic Expertise ◽  
History Of

The easy availability of deadly poisons in 19th-century Britain, Western Europe, and the United States led to widespread public anxiety about the prevalence of murder by poison, resulting in what might be termed a “poison panic.” The fear was fed by well-publicized reports of trials and executions which, though not especially numerous, seemed indicative of the dangerous incidence of a unique type of homicide, one that was particularly difficult to prevent or detect. As a result, poisoning crimes stimulated the development of the earliest medicolegal specialism, forensic toxicology, and consequently the careers of some of the best known expert witnesses of the Victorian era, including Mathieu Orfila, Alfred Swaine Taylor, Thomas Stevenson, and Theodore Wormley. This article traces the history of poisoning crimes and the related medico-scientific discipline of forensic toxicology using textbooks, key trials, and crime statistics to examine and evaluate their contribution to the historical development of forensic expertise and practice.

العربية المقاربة المقاصديّة في ردّ ابن فودي على القادح في جلستهم الدعويّة

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alawiye Abdulmumin Abdurrazzaq ◽  
Ahmad Wifaq Mokhtar ◽  
Abdul Manan Ismail
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Analytical Methods ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Subject

This article is aimed to examine the extent of the application of Islamic legal objectives by Sheikh Abdullah bn Fudi in his rejoinder against one of their contemporary scholars who accused them of being over-liberal about the religion. He claimed that there has been a careless intermingling of men and women in the preaching and counselling gathering they used to hold, under the leadership of Sheikh Uthman bn Fudi (the Islamic reformer of the nineteenth century in Nigeria and West Africa). Thus, in this study, the researchers seek to answer the following interrogations: who was Abdullah bn Fudi? who was their critic? what was the subject matter of the criticism? How did the rebutter get equipped with some guidelines of higher objectives of Sharĩʻah in his rejoinder to the critic? To this end, this study had tackled the questions afore-stated by using inductive, descriptive and analytical methods to identify the personalities involved, define and analyze some concepts and matters considered as the hub of the study.

A history of some fruit models in wax and other materials: scientific teaching aids and courtly table decorations

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-JüRgen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fruit Trees ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Teaching Aids ◽  
Scientific Teaching ◽  
Glass Marble ◽  
History Of ◽  
By Products ◽  
Wax Models

Two early nineteenth century texts treating the production and use of wax models of fruit reveal the history of these objects in the context of courtly decoration. Both sources emphasise the models' decorative qualities and their suitability for display, properties which were not simply by-products of the realism that the use of wax allowed. Thus, such models were not regarded merely as visual aids for educational purposes. The artists who created them sought to entice collectors of art and natural history objects, as well as teachers and scientists. Wax models of fruits are known to have been collected and displayed as early as the seventeenth century, although only one such collection is extant. Before the early nineteenth century models of fruits made from wax or other materials (glass, marble, faience) were considered worthy of display because contemporaries attached great importance to mastery of the cultivation and grafting of fruit trees. This skill could only be demonstrated by actually showing the fruits themselves. Therefore, wax models made before the early nineteenth century may also be regarded as attempts to preserve natural products beyond the point of decay.

Adam Zalužanský’s “De sexu plantarum” (1592): an early pioneering chapter on plant sexuality

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
History Of Botany ◽  
Main Work ◽  
Botanical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.

Correspondence between Adolphe Brongniart and Robert Schomburgk: trading natural history collections for honours

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-336
Author(s):  
PIOTR DASZKIEWICZ ◽  
MICHEL JEGU
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Herbarium Specimens ◽  
British Guiana ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
History Of ◽  
Source Of Information ◽  
German Naturalist

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses some correspondence between Robert Schomburgk (1804–1865) and Adolphe Brongniart (1801–1876). Four letters survive, containing information about the history of Schomburgk's collection of fishes and plants from British Guiana, and his herbarium specimens from Dominican Republic and southeast Asia. A study of these letters has enabled us to confirm that Schomburgk supplied the collection of fishes from Guiana now in the Laboratoire d'Ichtyologie, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. The letters of the German naturalist are an interesting source of information concerning the practice of sale and exchange of natural history collections in the nineteenth century in return for honours.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

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