scholarly journals Michael Alberti and the Medical Therapy of the Internal Senses

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-266
Author(s):  
Andreas Rydberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Early Modern Medicine ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
Health And Disease ◽  
The Right ◽  
Therapeutic Perspective ◽  
German Physician

Abstract In the first half of the eighteenth century, the German physician Michael Alberti was responsible for hundreds of dissertations and other works in medicine. While the bulk of the production reflected the dominating medical topics of his time, he also developed an original focus on the internal senses and their effects on bodily health and disease. Depending on whether internal senses, such as imagination and memory, were cultivated in the right way or not, they could work as powerful remedies or as equally powerful triggers of disease and even death. This article explores this little known strand of early modern medicine in three steps. First, it shows that Alberti’s medicine took form in intimate connection to the Stahlian brand of Pietist medicine. As such, it further elaborated an existing strand of medicine that was intimately connected to German Pietism. Second, it analyses in some detail the role of the internal senses from a pathological and therapeutic perspective as well as examining what kind of persona the physician ought to embody. Lastly, it raises larger questions regarding how to understand this strand of early modern medicine. Rather than approaching it from the perspective of disciplinary history, the article seeks to reconstruct it as a part of what has sometimes been referred to as the early modern cultura animi tradition.

scholarly journals ‘Magic coins’ and ‘magic squares’: the discovery of astrological sigils in the Oldenburg Letters

2008 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Perceived Efficacy ◽  
Magic Squares ◽  
Early Modern Medicine

Enclosed in a 1673 letter to Henry Oldenburg were two drawings of a series of astrological sigils, coins and amulets from the collection of Strasbourg mathematician Julius Reichelt (1637–1719). As portrayals of particular medieval and early modern sigils are relatively rare, this paper will analyse the role of these medals in medieval and early modern medicine, the logic behind their perceived efficacy, and their significance in early modern astrological and cabalistic practice. I shall also demonstrate their change in status in the late seventeenth century from potent magical healing amulets tied to the mysteries of the heavens to objects kept in a cabinet for curiosos. The evolving perception of the purpose of sigils mirrored changing early modern beliefs in the occult influences of the heavens upon the body and the natural world, as well as the growing interests among virtuosi in collecting, numismatics and antiquities.

scholarly journals Puer barbatus: Precocious Puberty in Early Modern Medicine

2020 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-52
Author(s):  
Diederik F Janssen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Precocious Puberty ◽  
Pubertal Timing ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Social Stressors ◽  
Marriage Age ◽  
Early Modern Medicine ◽  
Novel Reading

Abstract During early modernity, medico-legal concerns with timing puberty gave way to physiological and medical-hygienic concerns with pubertal timing. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical-jurisprudential tracts isolated rare cases of conception before the legal marriage age. Scattered reports of “monstrously” early menarche and “prodigious” male puberty were offered from the latter half of the seventeenth century. Tied to excess heat, moisture, plethora and climate since antiquity, in the second half of the eighteenth century pubertal timing attracted sustained commentary regarding the purported role of social stressors, from novel-reading to diet and trousers. Both the known variability and strikingly outlying instances of pubertal timing thus provided an inroad to unravelling such perennial explanatory devices as temperament, constitution, and life style. Despite and in part because of its explanatory significance in early modern physiology, leading eighteenth-century nosologists did not yet itemize precocious puberty. One precocious boy described in the 1740s, the Willingham Prodigy, provided the best documented early medical and public response. Formal nosological interest followed by the 1760s, initially under Haller’s heading of excessive growth (incrementum nimium, tied to enhanced circulation) and only much later under Meckel the Younger’s heading of premature development (vorschnelle Entwicklung).

The will to give: charitable bequests, inter vivos gifts and community building in the Dutch Republic, c. 1600–1800

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELISE VAN NEDERVEEN MEERKERK
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Charitable Giving ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
The Will ◽  
Charitable Bequests

ABSTRACTThis article explores the role of different social groups in early modern Dutch towns in organising and financing poor relief. Examining both the income structure of Dutch urban poor relief organisations and voluntary donations and bequests by citizens reveals what motivations lay behind their involvement, and how and why these changed over time. In the seventeenth century, ‘middle groups’ donated more often and higher mean amounts, reflecting their efforts to contribute to urban community building. In the eighteenth century, the elite became relatively more involved in charitable giving. Also, the urge to give to one's own religious group seems to have increased in this period.

Cultures of collecting

2021 ◽  
pp. 138-164
Author(s):  
David Pearson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Medieval Manuscripts ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Book Collecting ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Material Evidence

Studies of private libraries and their owners invariably talk about ‘book collecting’—is this the right terminology? After summarizing our broadly held understanding of the evolution of bibliophile collecting from the eighteenth century onwards, this chapter considers the extent to which similar behaviours can be detected (or not) in the seventeenth, drawing on the material evidence of bookbindings, wording in wills, and other sources. Do we find subject-based collecting, of the kind we are familiar with today, as a characteristic of early modern book owners? Some distinctions are recognized in ways in which medieval manuscripts (as opposed to printed books) were brought together at this time. The relationship between libraries and museums, and contemporary attitudes to them, is explored. The concluding argument is that ‘collecting’ is a careless word to use in the seventeenth-century context; just as we should talk about users rather than readers, we should use ‘owners’ rather than ‘collectors’ as the default term, unless there is evidence to the contrary.

scholarly journals THE INNER LIVES OF EARLY MODERN TRAVEL

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK R. F. WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Many ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractThis article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.

Vesalius annotations and the rise of early modern medicine

The Lancet ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 393 (10173) ◽  
pp. 738-739
Author(s):  
Dániel Margócsy ◽  
Mark Somos ◽  
Stephen N Joffe
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Early Modern Medicine

‘For whom the bell tolls’: Listening and its Implications

2010 ◽  
Vol 135 (S1) ◽  
pp. 19-24
Author(s):  
David R. M. Irving
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Music ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
Work Concept ◽  
Alternative Set

ABSTRACTThis response highlights the cultural specificity of the ‘work-concept’ and questions the tripartite scheme of listening proposed by John Butt. It offers an alternative set of listening categories, and makes reference to the issues of early-modern class structures and the role of music in religious devotions. The argument is supported by critiques of historical vignettes that include the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's transcription of Gregorio Allegri's Miserere and Jean Joseph Marie Amiot's demonstration of French music to a Chinese audience in the mid-eighteenth century.

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