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?

'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.

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.

The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

Kant and a Philosophical History of Logic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huaping Lu-Adler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
History Of Logic ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
Systematic Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Kantian Theory

This chapter discusses certain exegetical challenges posed by Kant’s logic corpus, which comprises the Logic compiled by Jäsche, Kant’s notes on logic, transcripts of his logic lectures, and remarks about logic in his own publications. It argues for a “history of philosophical problems” method by which to reconstruct a Kantian theory of logic that is maximally coherent, philosophically interesting, and historically significant. To ensure a principled application of this method, the chapter considers Kant’s conception of history against the background of the controversy between eclecticism and systematic philosophy that shaped the German philosophical discourse during the early eighteenth century. It thereby looks for an angle to make educated decisions about how to select materials from each of the periods considered in the book and builds a historical narrative that can best inform our understanding of Kant’s theory of logic.

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