Thoughts to Consider While Reading Barker’s Manuscript: Presentism, Whiggish History, and the Post Hoc Fallacy

2020 ◽  
pp. 118-132
Author(s):  
Richard J. Kahn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Physician Patient Relationship ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Nineteenth Century Medicine ◽  
Cellular Pathology ◽  
Post Hoc ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Physician Patient

The holistic tradition of Hippocrates and Galen ended in the nineteenth century with the arrival of disease specificity. Thus, the correction of imbalances provoked by noxious air, inappropriate behavior, the environment, air, water, food, emotions, exercise, rest, and evacuations gave way to the biomedical model, reductionist medicine, and positive scientific authority. By the late nineteenth century, medicine had incorporated Rudolf Virchow’s cellular pathology (1858), Joseph Lister’s surgical antisepsis (1865), Louis Pasteur’s bacteriology (1860s), and Robert Koch’s discovery of the tuberculosis germ (1880s). But John Harley Warner maintains that in Barker’s era, therapeutic action was an essential part of professional identity, as physicians struggled with skepticism regarding medical therapy and the relative merits of nature healing versus the need for therapeutics such as bleeding, purging, and mercurials. Charles Rosenberg emphasizes the importance to the physician–patient relationship of “exhibiting” a drug. To evaluate the validity of Barker’s knowledge and treatments, the twenty-first-century reader must avoid presentism, whiggish history, and the post hoc fallacy, and must consider confirmation bias. Was Barker using the best available evidence in 1820? Were his decisions evidence-based?

Rethinking Mahler

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Analysis ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Temporal Experience ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Historical Past

Gustav Mahler’s anniversary years (2010–11) have provided an opportunity to rethink the composer’s position within the musical, cultural and multi-disciplinary landscapes of the twenty-first century, as well as to reassess his relationship with the historical traditions of his own time. Comprising a collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field, Rethinking Mahler in part counterbalances common scholarly assumptions and preferences which predominantly configure Mahler as proto-modernist, with hitherto somewhat neglected consideration of his debt to, and his re-imagining of, the legacies of his own historical past. It reassesses his engagement both with the immediate creative and cultural present of the late nineteenth century, and with the weight of a creative and cultural past that was the inheritance of artists living and working at that time. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives the contributors pursue ideas of nostalgia, historicism and ‘pastness’ in relation to an emergent pluralist modernity and subsequent musical-cultural developments. Mahler’s relationship with music, media and ideas past, present, and future is explored in three themed sections, addressing among them issues in structural analysis; cultural contexts; aesthetics; reception; performance, genres of stage, screen and literature; history/historiography; and temporal experience.

Police Records

2019 ◽  
pp. 797-819
Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Media History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.

The Science of Destruction

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Werrett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Explosive Chemicals

This chapter surveys the evolution of chemical and mechanical weapons used by terrorists between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, ranging from the diabolical contraptions of “infernal machines” to dynamite, the terrorist’s favorite explosive, invented by Alfred Nobel in the 1860s. The chapter also explores the ingenuity of terror. While anarchists and revolutionaries who used explosive chemicals are often represented as merely consumers of the latest scientific creations, the chapter argues that in fact these communities showed considerable ingenuity in devising new weapons. A brief case study of the career of Irish nationalist Robert Emmet’s rockets in the pre-dynamite era demonstrates this. The chapter concludes by considering the relationship of terror and science, and contrasts the radical political views of terrorists with their typically unchallenging acceptance of scientific authority and opinions in the nineteenth century.

The Bible and Creationism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan L. Trollinger ◽  
William Vance Trollinger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Organic Evolution ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Young Earth Creationism ◽  
Conservative Protestants ◽  
Over Time

Biblical creationism emerged in the late nineteenth century among conservative Protestants who were unable to square a plain, commonsensical, “literal” reading of the Bible with Charles Darwin’s theory of organic evolution. As this chapter details, over time a variety of increasingly literal “creationisms” have emerged. For the first century after Origin of Species (1859), old Earth creationism—which accepted mainstream geology—held sway. But with the 1961 publication of The Genesis Flood—Noah’s flood explains the geological strata—young Earth creationism took center stage. Waiting in the wings, however, is a geocentric creationism that rejects mainstream biology, geology, and cosmology.

Gay Affections

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard P. Loughlin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Gay Identities

This chapter considers how gay identities—and so gay affections—were formed in the course of the twentieth century, building on the late nineteenth-century invention of the ‘homosexual’. It also considers earlier construals of same-sex affections and the people who had them, the soft men and hard women of the first century and the sodomites of the eleventh. It thus sketches a history of continuities and discontinuities, of overlapping identities and emotional possibilities. The chapter resists the assumption that gay identity and experience can be reduced to anything less than the multitude of gay people, and that as Christians they have to give an account of themselves in a way that heterosexual Christians do not. The chapter warns against thinking gay identity undone in Christ.

Sources of International Law in the Nineteenth-Century European Tradition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauri Mälksoo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
International Justice ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Legal Positivist

This chapter examines how international lawyers arrived in 1920 at the codification of Article 38 in the Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ, later ICJ). The codification is explained as a victory of legal positivist ideas over natural law concepts. An overview of the positions defended in the late nineteenth-century literature of international law demonstrates that the codification largely reflected predominant ideas in the European tradition of international law. Here, legal positivism had undertaken a quite successful attack against natural law. Thus, when comparing the predominant views on sources of international law in the nineteenth century and in the twenty-first century, the differences in the practice of international law must be kept in mind.

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