scholarly journals Cure or Protection? The meaning of smallpox inoculation, ca 1750–1775

2013 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 516-536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Eriksen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Probabilistic Thinking ◽  
Complex Roots ◽  
Humoral Pathology ◽  
Medical Theory ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
To Come ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

AbstractThe idea that smallpox could be eradicated was not necessarily the ultimate aim when inoculation was introduced in Europe in the 1720s. This potentiality was not clearly articulated as an aim until the end of the eighteenth century. This article argues that during most of the eighteenth century, the main aim of inoculation was to lead people as safely as possible through what was regarded as an unavoidable disease. Inoculation became safer, simpler and less expensive from the 1760s, but the changing ideas about its potentiality had more complex roots. A new understanding was produced through an interaction between inoculation practice, more general medical theory and developments within probabilistic thinking and political arithmetic. The first part of the article explores how smallpox inoculation was incorporated into existing medical thinking based on traditional humoral pathology. Inoculation was a new technology, but as it was perceived in the early eighteenth century, the innovation did not first and foremost concern the medical principles of the treatment. The second part of the article investigates arguments about why and when to inoculate: what kind of remedy was inoculation for eighteenth-century agents? The article concludes with a discussion on changes emerging towards the end of the century, and relates them to developments during the preceding decades rather than seeing them as inspired precursors of events and ideas to come.

‘Not Keeping One’s Place in the Church’

Church Life ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 193-211
Author(s):  
Anne Dunan-Page
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Baptist Churches ◽  
Lay Participation ◽  
Particular Baptist ◽  
Church Life ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Church ◽  
First Admission

This chapter examines the issue of absenteeism in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century gathered churches through their manuscript church records. Absenteeism was the offence most frequently cited in disciplinary meetings, yet some members who were censured for absence were active supporters of their churches in other ways. This chapter focuses on those members who were never under a sentence of excommunication but who had ceased to be involved in church life and to take communion. It examines the question of Dissenting identity through lay participation, the reasons why men and women ceased to come to church, and what prompted them to seek reconciliation, sometimes decades after their first admission. Evidence is taken from manuscript church records belonging to Congregational, Particular Baptist, and General Baptist churches, spanning the period c.1640 to c.1714.

'I Think it Highly Necessary to Have it Done Before They Go Out into the World': Inoculation, Responsibility and Patterns of Familial Transmission of Smallpox

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Leadbeater
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Familial Transmission ◽  
The World ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

This paper examines two research streams. First, it will discuss some contemporary familial perspectives on smallpox inoculation in the eighteenth century. This is followed by a look at the level of provision of the practice in Oxfordshire and some of its contiguous counties. Second, the paper will present some findings on the nature of the transmission of smallpox during local early eighteenth century epidemics in Banbury, Oxfordshire and Aynho, Northamptonshire. Finally, the paper will put forward some conclusions which encompass these two streams.

Advocating Inoculation in the Eighteenth Century: Exemplarity and Quantification

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Eriksen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mass Treatment ◽  
Inoculation Methods ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

ArgumentSmallpox inoculation was introduced in Europe in the early eighteenth century and has been considered the first mass treatment of disease based on practical use of probability calculations and mathematical tools of computation. The article argues that these new approaches were deeply entangled with other rationalities, most emphatically that of exemplarity. Changes in inoculation methods around mid-century gradually changed the conceptualization of disease, seeing all cases as fundamentally equal, and thus making it more relevant to count them. Arithmetic changed the ways of thinking about smallpox epidemics, but new ways of conceptualizing disease were vital to making it a matter of arithmetic at all. The article investigates what happened when numbers and figures were introduced into medical matters: Who did the figures really concern, and what types of argument were they fitted into? How were numbers transformed into metaphors, and how did quantitative argument work together with arguments from exemplarity?

scholarly journals Banking as an emerging technology: Hoare's Bank, 1702–1742

2006 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER TEMIN ◽  
HANS-JOACHIM VOTH
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Financial System ◽  
Emerging Technology ◽  
The State ◽  
Debt Management ◽  
Public Debt Management ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

We document the transition from goldsmith to banker in the case of Richard Hoare and his successors and examine the operation of the London loan market during the early eighteenth century. Analysis of the financial revolution in England has focused on changes in public debt management and the interest rates paid by the state. Much less is known about the evolution of the financial system providing credit to individual borrowers. We show how this progress took time because operating a deposit bank was new and different from being a goldsmith. Learning how to use the relatively new technology of deposit banking was crucial for the bank's success and survival.

Preparing for the Pox: A Theory of Smallpox in Bengal and Britain

2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 304-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harish Naraindas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Medical Theory ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

This essay is to be conceived in two parts. The first part is an exegesis of an eighteenth-century tract on the practice of smallpox inoculation in Bengal written by a Scottish medic. Cited repeatedly in the contemporary history and anthropology of smallpox in India, it has been invariably used to highlight the technique of inoculation in eighteenth-century India. Caught in disciplinary cleaving between anthropology and history, its original import has not been addressed. The exegesis in restoring the text to its intended import, argues that it offers a theory of smallpox, and in this theory the technique of inoculation is a moment in larger therapeutics. The latter-day privileging of this moment has resulted in seeing the nineteenth-century as a standoff between variolation (smallpox inoculation) and vaccination. The exegesis, however, recasts this as a passage from a therapeutics to a pure prophylactics that caccination represents. Having restored what I think is the central concern of the essay, I then begin to ask whether the essay is actually about the manner of inoculating for the smallpox in Bengal as Holwell says it is or is it actually about its practice in Britain. It is this very restoration, when we locate the essay in 18th century Britain, that allows us, in the latter part of the essay, to to see that not only is the theoretical articulation "induced" by his audience, but also every detail of the description of the practice , which has hitherto been seen as a description determined by his experience in India, is equally induced and determined by his location in Britain . While this could lead me to argue that Holwell's essay has nothing to do with India, I suggest that what the text effects, if not represents, is a kind of translation : one that is both possible and enabled by the fact that the kind of medical theory and practice that underlies disease and its cure is similar - not identical - in India and Britain.

The Records of the Court of Arches

1953 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Doreen Slatter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Ecclesiastical Law ◽  
Modern Style ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
To Come

The surviving continuous records of the Court of Arches, or, to give it its full modern style, the ‘beloved Court of Canterbury of the Arches’, tell its history only from the Restoration. It had already been respected for centuries as the chief ecclesiastical court of the province of Canterbury and a large number of suits continued to come before it every year. The judge or Official Principal, commonly known as the Dean of the Arches from his lesser office as judge in the archbishop of Canterbury's peculiar of that name, was a person of considerable influence and importance. The proctors and advocates who conducted the cases were the more successful members of a flourishing profession. In the early eighteenth century, Thomas Oughton, the writer on ecclesiastical law, who was a proctor of the court, spoke of it with awe and veneration. ‘Let us reverently enter on one of the court days into the sanctuary of this august tribunal. … Behold! How solemn, how awakening the aspect of justice! … At first glance who is not penetrated with emotions of affection and veneration!’ But the court was shorn of most of its jurisdiction during the nineteenth century and it was described by Dickens in 1850 with very different feelings. The society of Doctors' Commons, the stronghold of the profession of the ecclesiastical law, was dissolved in accordance with the Court of Probate Act of 1857 and its buildings were pulled down.

The Ambivalence of the Early Royal Society

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-85
Author(s):  
Michael Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
To Come

This chapter turns to the rather paradoxical role of the early Royal Society in connection with magic, since as an institution it proved far less supportive of the supernaturalist project of Joseph Glanvill and Robert Boyle than might have been expected. This reveals significant fissures in scientific circles at the time which are often ignored. It was only in the early eighteenth century that the society's avoidance of magic was construed as displaying a systematically sceptical attitude which in practice had never really existed. This formed a part of the process by which the orthodox gradually began to come round to a cautiously sceptical viewpoint. The chapter ends by considering the legacy of their misrepresentation of the society's earlier role down to the twentieth century.

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