Health and Medicine in the Enlightenment

Author(s):  
E. C. Spray

This article discusses the transformation of medicine at the very end of the century and thus represents a shift both in the training of medical practitioners and in accounts of the body. The eighteenth century has been described as a time of increasing medicalization of Western societies. Though this is usually portrayed as a growth in the power of medical practitioners over ordinary life, in practice lay people may also understand it as an increasing embrace of the medical. The eighteenth century continues to be viewed as a critical period in the history of medicine, as the century when bodies became the subject of large-scale political intervention, from centralized responses to plague epidemics or mass inoculation programmes early in the century to the growing use of mortality tables at its end. To portray these knowledge projects in all their complexity, historians still need to embrace the full implications of treating eighteenth-century medical knowledge as a political enterprise.

Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone

This chapter examines how Michel Foucault reformulated the philosophical issue of the Enlightenment by moving from a deliberate rereading of the Hegelian Centaur to an advocacy of the “death of man”—the extinction of a rational platform of knowledge along the lines developed by Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century. It considers Foucault's genealogical historiography, a new and original tool for the analysis of history, and his arguments against the idea of a necessary and defining connection between knowledge and virtue, which had been the core identity of the Enlightenment, the link between power and knowledge, and the rise of disciplinary violence in the history of the Western world. Finally, it explores Foucault's view that “critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its exercise of power, and to question power on its discourses of truth.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 102 (4) ◽  
pp. 570-580
Author(s):  
A V Shulaev ◽  
A Yu Ivanov ◽  
R G Ivanova ◽  
A A Shikaleva

The introduction of the new University Charter and the era of large-scale reforms in the middle of the XIX century, the emergence of experimental methods of research, and at the same time, the remaining urgent issues of the spread of epidemic diseases made the opening of departments of hygiene acutely necessary. The process of formation and subsequent institutionalization of hygiene teaching as a discipline has not previously been comprehensively covered by researchers in Russian historiography. The possibility of identifying a number of unresolved systemically important tasks allowing to synthesize the main directions of the scientific study of the process of hygiene development in the historical and medical knowledge from an institutional perspective was realized in this article. The history of the organization of hygiene departments in Russia is the subject of many studies. And the publications of general historical medical monographs and textbooks often contain contradictory information that does not reflect some important details and peculiarities of the formation of the traditions of teaching this discipline, which were established in the second half of the XIX century. The result of the study was clarification of data on medical workers who became the first hygiene educators in Russia. It was determined that the regular teaching of hygiene as a separate discipline began in the second semester of the 18641865 academic year at the medical faculty of the Imperial Kazan University. The first teacher of hygiene in Russia was Professor of Kazan University Arkady Ivanovich Yakobii. It was also clarified that regular hygiene teaching at the Saint Petersburg Imperial Medico-Surgical Academy was established in November 1865. Ivan Maksimovich Sorokin was the first hygiene teacher at the Academy and the first head of the hygiene department. Alexey Petrovich Dobroslavin, who was previously considered the first head of the hygiene department, actually became the second head of the corresponding department, starting teaching only in 1872.


2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 474-487
Author(s):  
Marie-Pauline Martin

Abstract Today there is a consensus on the definition of the term ‘rococo’: it designates a style both particular and homogeneous, artistically related to the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI. But we must not forget that in its primitive formulations, the rococo has no objective existence. As a witty, sneering, and impertinent word, it can adapt itself to the most varied discourses and needs, far beyond references to the eighteenth century. Its malleability guarantees its sparkling success in different languages, but also its highly contradictory uses. By tracing the genealogy of the word ‘rococo’, this article will show that the association of the term with the century of Louis XV is a form of historical discrimination that still prevails widely in the history of the art of the Enlightenment.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIA DOE

ABSTRACTLarge-scale programming studies of French Revolutionary theatre confirm that the most frequently staged opera of the 1790s was not one of the politically charged, compositionally progressive works that have come to define the era for posterity, but rather a pastoral comedy from mid-century:Les deux chasseurs et la laitière(1763), with a score by Egidio Duni to a libretto by Louis Anseaume. This article draws upon both musical and archival evidence to establish an extended performance history ofLes deux chasseurs, and a more nuanced explanation for its enduring hold on the French lyric stage. I consider the pragmatic, legal and aesthetic factors contributing to the comedy's widespread adaptability, including its cosmopolitan musical idiom, scenographic simplicity and ready familiarity amongst consumers of printed music. More broadly, I address the advantages and limitations of corpus-based analysis with respect to delineating the operatic canon. In late eighteenth-century Paris, observers were already beginning to identify a chasm between their theatre-going experiences and the reactions of critics: Was a true piece of ‘Revolutionary’ theatre one that was heralded as emblematic of its time, or one, likeLes deux chasseurs, that was so frequently seen that it hardly elicited a mention in the printed record?


2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-217
Author(s):  
Vanja Radakovic

In the history of philosophy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is mainly considered as an atypical philosopher of the Enlightenment, as a pioneer of the revolutionary idea of a free civilian state and natural law; in literary history, he is considered the forerunner of Romanticism, the writer who perfected the form of an epistolary novel, as well as a sentimentalist. However, this paper focuses on the biographical approach, which was mostly excluded in observation of those works revealing Rousseau as the originator of the autobiographical novelistic genre. The subject of this paper is the issue of credibility of self-portraits, and through this problem it highlights the facts from the author?s life. This paper relies on a biographical approach, not in the positivistic sense but in the phenomenological key. This paper is mainly inspired by the works of the Geneva School theorists - Starobinski, Poulet and Rousset.


Bibliosphere ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
V. V. Goncharova

The interdisciplinary character of the science of language causes great difficulties in bibliographic support in this field. The object of bibliographing in linguistics is not only literature on the language, but also a variety of linguistic resources, which represent a special object to study a branch of linguistics - lexicography. Bibliography of linguistics is the least studied field by specialists among humanitarian bibliographic complexes. The paper first studied the array of domestic bibliographic sources for more than 150 years; the most significant of them are shown. The subject of research is national bibliographic resources in the linguistics field. The objective is to characterize the historical development of the linguistic bibliography in Russia. To achieve this goal we had to solve a number of tasks: identify existing sources for ongoing historical research; to trace the history of forming bibliographic sources, bibliography of bibliographies of linguistics; to form and analyze the body of bibliographic materials; to characterize the problematic areas in the bibliographic software of linguistics. Using the bibliometric analysis it was studied an array of bibliographic products published between 1860 and 2013, the dynamics of bibliographic resources formation was determined, the degree of bibliographic support of some topics and issues in linguistic science and prior directions of their development were revealed. The main results of the study should be considered: 1. The nuclear of fundamental indices on general and applied linguistics is singled out in analyzed literature sources covering the period 1918-1977, as well as in Slavic linguistics for 1825-1981. The complex of current and retrospective bibliographic products was formed and replenished in the country in 1963-1988. 2. The largest share of bibliographic sources in linguistics is presented by book and article bibliography (over 70%), many of which remain bibliographically unrecorded and unused. 3. The following subject areas of linguistics are considered to be bibliographically supported: inter-linguistics, culture of speech and language norms, lexicography, linguistic geography, linguistics regional geography, onomastics. 4. An obvious need to continue the index or database of bibliographic aids in the field of linguistics over the past 50 years is marked. 5. Further development of the linguistics bibliography is impossible to imagine without creating an electronic guide on the bibliographic resources of linguistics, which would reflect the diversity of bibliographical resources and provide their rich information potential for professionals and remote users


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-225
Author(s):  
Marthe Kretzschmar

Knowledge of the materiality of stone during the Enlightenment expanded following the exploration of mineralogical structure, to alter ideas about taxonomy and challenge the role of rocks in the history of the earth. Close studies of the material of marble sculpture generated expertise on grain size, surface varieties and stone deposits. This mode of reception became intertwined with contemporary controversies about the age of the earth. This article focuses on both French sculpture and geological discourses of the eighteenth century to reveal an international and interdisciplinary network centring on protagonists such as Denis Diderot, Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach and Étienne-Maurice Falconet; through these figures, debates can be connected concerning both geology and art theory. Within these contexts, the article discusses the translation processes between these artistic and geological interests.


Author(s):  
Robert Wokler ◽  
Christopher Brooke

This chapter retraces Alasdair MacIntyre's own construal of the Enlightenment Project's trajectory in order to show how his interpretation of an intellectual tradition depends above all on his assessment of its impact. It argues that MacIntyre's Enlightenment Project is largely unreconstructed, unredeemed, and undiminished in its failure, even after substantial embellishment. His three principal works comprise an extraordinary indictment of the theoretical and practical legacy of eighteenth-century philosophy. His account projects the Enlightenment's implications and influence as they stem from its aims. He holds it to blame for some of the most sinister aspects of a morally vacuous civilization, cursed by the malediction of unlicenced Reason. His intellectual history of the period forms one of the mainsprings of his own philosophy.


Author(s):  
Philip V. Bohlman

The translations in Song Loves the Masses close with Herder’s final large-scale essay on music, published in 1800 as a chapter in Kalligone, the culmination of his aesthetic work. With this late essay Herder, a polemic against his former teacher, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), reveals the extent to which he has moved into a fully aesthetic domain in his concern for the universal history of humanity. Embodying the subjectivity of song and singing, music acquires the force of transcendence, and it therefore aspires to the Enlightenment ideals of the sublime. In Herder’s “On Music,” human beings are endowed with a degree of understanding that allows them to perceive the traits that make music unlike any other form of expression.


Author(s):  
P. J. E. Peebles

This chapter discusses the development of physical sciences in seemingly chaotic ways, by paths that are at best dimly seen at the time. It refers to the history of ideas as an important part of any science, and particularly worth examining in cosmology, where the subject has evolved over several generations. It also examines the puzzle of inertia, which traces the connection to Albert Einstein's bold idea that the universe is homogeneous in the large-scale average called “cosmological principle.” The chapter cites Newtonian mechanics that defines a set of preferred motions in space, the inertial reference frames, by the condition that a freely moving body has a constant velocity. It talks about Ernst Mach, who argued that inertial frames are determined relative to the motion of the rest of the matter in the universe.


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