The life and works of Sir Alexander Crichton , F. R. S. (1763-1856): a Scottish physician to the Imperial Russian Court

The area of Newington, to the South of Edinburgh Medical School, belonged briefly in the eighteenth century to the Crichton family (1), distant descendents of the sixteenth-century soldier of fortune, James Crichton, known to history as ‘The Admirable Crichton’ (2). In the nineteenth century two members of this family (3, 4), Sir Alexander Crichton and his nephew Sir Archibald W illiam Crichton, served as physicians to the Tsars of Russia (5, 6). Sir Alexander’s grandfather, Patrick Crichton, was a saddler and ironmonger in the Canongate, Edinburgh (7), a man of some means who acquired Newington House from W illiam Tytler the Clerk to the Signet, in 1749 (8). Tw o years later he became the owner of the remainder of the Newington estate, and on his death in 1759 the property passed to the two surviving sons of his twenty-two children: William, a London alderman and High Sheriff of Middlesex, and Alexander, a coachmaker in Newington (7). Alexander had a thriving business, frequently sending carriages abroad to travelling Scotsmen, and a letter to him from the diplomatist Robert Liston survives, praising the carriage received in Madrid, adding that ‘it may put it in my power to send you more orders of the same kind’ (9). Indeed, Liston’s carriage had already attracted a further order before leaving Crichton’s Edinburgh workplace in Greenside, for as the coachmaker replied ‘The chariot sent you has been much admired here by our own countrymen and the English and I am happy to inform you that Dr Rogerson of Petersburg and a gentleman from Moscow were so much pleased with it that they have ordered carriages exactly the same’ (10).

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.


1966 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 22-33 ◽  

Thomas Graham Brown was a neurophysiologist well known in the twenties for the detailed studies of reflex movement and posture which he made by Sherrington’s methods, and perhaps better known in the thirties as the redoubtable climber who had found several new routes to the summit of Mont Blanc. He was born in 1882 in Edinburgh. His father, Dr J. J. Graham Brown, was to be President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1912 and was related to several of the eminent doctors who had maintained the reputation of the Edinburgh Medical School throughout the nineteenth century. It was natural therefore that the son should be trained to medicine and should go to his father’s school, the Edinburgh Academy, and afterwards to the University as a medical student. There were four children in the family, Thomas, the eldest, a brother who became a Captain in the Royal Navy, one who became an architect and one sister. The two elder boys used sometimes to sail with their father in the yacht which he shared with a friend, and in Thomas the interest revived when he was too old for climbing but could still make long cruises in a small motor boat. When he was a schoolboy he was fond of swimming and diving, skating and golf, but there was a period when his eyesight was troublesome and he was sent to an oculist friend of his father in Wiesbaden to be treated and to learn German.


Author(s):  
Larry Eugene Rivers

This chapter looks at how on the plantations and farms of nineteenth-century Florida, enslaved people, like their counterparts throughout the South, rarely rose up in rebellion against their masters. In their daily dissidence, slaves—as Gerald W. Mullin noted for eighteenth-century slaves in Virginia—more commonly used inward or non-threatening forms of rebellion that did not undermine Florida′s slave society in any profound manner. These could involve work stoppages and feigned illnesses, among other things. Yet, enslaved Florida blacks often did not bite their tongues when expressing thoughts about their work routines. These tactics could have proven self-destructive and even fatal in a violent Florida frontier area, but slaves still used these token forms of rebellion to wrest concessions from their masters as they strove to create, preserve, and protect family and community.


1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. D. D. Newitt

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.


X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ildefonso Navarro Luengo ◽  
Adrián Suárez Bedmar ◽  
Pedro Martín Parrado

The castle of San Luis (Estepona Málaga): Origin and evolution of a bastion fort. Sixteenth to twenty-first centuriesThe results of the investigation prior to the excavation work in the Castle of San Luis, in Estepona (Málaga, Spain) are presented. It is a coastal fortress built in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, in the context of the reorganisation of the defense of the western coast of Malaga after the Moorish rebellion of 1568. After analysing the available literature, we propose that it was designed by the Engineer Juan Ambrosio Malgrá, Maestro Mayor de obras del Reino de Granada. The Castle of San Luis is devised as an add-on construction on the southern front of the walls of Islamic origin, dominating the natural anchorage of the Rada beach. Its most prominent elements are three bastions, two of them with casemates, and a large main square. However, various defects in the design and execution of the works, added to the insufficient provision of artillery and garrison, affected the effectiveness of the fortification throughout its history. In the middle of the eighteenth century, part of the Castle of San Luis is restructured as a cannons’ battery. Following the damage caused by the Lisbon Earthquake, in 1755, and by the French and English blastings in 1812, during the second half of the nineteenth century much of the castle disappears, leaving only the cannons’ battery, which is incorporated as a courtyard in height as an add-on to a house built at the end of the nineteenth century. At present, after several decades of abandonment, excavation works have been undertaken on the remains of the battery, after which the site will be prepared to be used as a museum.


Author(s):  
Walter B. Redmond

Colonial refers to Spanish and Portuguese sovereignty in America from the arrival of Columbus in 1492 up to the emergence of modern Latin American states in the nineteenth century. The intellectual life of the colonies and their mother countries at that time falls into two phases: traditional and modern. The traditional phase includes the siglo de oro, or the Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was a time when literature and the arts flourished, along with Scholastic philosophy, jurisprudence and theology. During the eighteenth century, traditional thought gradually gave way to modern movements, particularly from France. The universities founded in the mid-sixteenth century, notably those of Mexico and Peru, as well as colleges and seminaries, were impressively productive in the area of philosophy. The pressure of events such as the clash between European and Native American cultures in the sixteenth century and the struggle for independence from Spain and Portugal in the nineteenth century brought about numerous nonacademic works with philosophic content. Authors wrote in both Latin and Spanish or Portuguese and often knew native languages, such as Nahuatl and Quechua as well. Many operated in several different areas, such as the nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language, who wrote a book on logic in Latin, which has since been lost. Students studied philosophy first, then specialized in medicine, law, or theology. The core philosophy curriculum was logic, natural philosophy or physics and metaphysics. In the eighteenth century Scholastic logic, similar to what has come to be known as formal logic, was weakened and natural philosophy began to incorporate experimental science. The bulk of philosophy was affected by modern thinkers such as René Descartes. Eighteenth-century savants were critical of Scholasticism and later Latin American intellectuals tended to disavow the entire colonial past. However, historians since the 1940s have stressed the currency of modern scholarship, especially in science and since the 1960s have been rediscovering the sophisticated philosophy of the Golden Age.


1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Kiyaga-Mulindwa

Recent archaeological excavations have revealed two distinct pottery traditions in the Birim Valley, southern Ghana. These have been classified as the ‘Earthworks Ware’ and the ‘Atwea Ware’. In certain archaeological contexts, the ‘Atwea Ware’ succeeds ‘Earthworks Ware’, and it also continues into present-day ethnography. The discontinuity between these two pottery traditions suggests a change in population. It is therefore suggested here that the population of ‘Earthworks Ware’ makers was one of the early victims of the Atlantic slave trade from about the mid-sixteenth century and that they were replaced in this area of the Birim Valley around a.d. 1700 by the Atweafo, a Twi-speaking group, whose descendants live there to this day. From the eighteenth century until close to the end of the nineteenth century a number of Denkyira, Asini and Asante migrants also moved into this valley. During this time the militarily weak Atweafo lived at the mercy of four major powers – the Asante, Akim Abuakwa, Akim Kotoku and the Akwamu. However, the Atweafo found means to survive under what seems to have been a highly volatile political environment by shifting their loyalty amongst these powers as situations dictated.


1955 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 416-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Frankel

Yugoslav federalism does not begin with the federal constitution adopted eight years ago. Federal ideas among the South Slavs followed the stirrings of nationalism and the struggle for independence at the end of the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth century as the logical solution for a situation in which the various tribes wished to be united but not unitary.With the exception of the Serbian Highlanders in Montenegro, who had been enjoying a precarious independence since 1697, the South Slav tribes were divided between the multi-national Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires. They generally showed little political consciousness either as separate tribes or as members of the Slav family. The first integrating movement among them began in the last three decades of the eighteenth century in the shape of vague Pan-Slav ideas stimulated by the Russian advance towards the Balkans. Pan-Slavism appealed both to many South Slav intellectuals and to the illiterate masses, but was too vague and too weak to counteract the various religious, linguistic, political, and historical differences among the tribes. Moreover, the relations between the three major tribes were disturbed by violent territorial disputes: Macedonia was the bone of contention between the Serbs and the Bulgarians, while Bosnia and Herzegovina were disputed by the Serbs and the Croats.


1988 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merid W. Aregay

This article draws attention to the possible importance of coffee exports from Ethiopia before the mid-nineteenth century. They may well have been a factor in attempts by Ethiopian emperors in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to develop trade in Yaman, in India and with the Dutch in Java. By 1690, coffee was being exported from Zayla, and perhaps by other outlets. In 1705 and 1737 there were unsuccessful attempts by Europeans to obtain coffee direct from Ethiopia, though meanwhile the growth of plantations in European colonies had rendered such effort superfluous. Nonetheless, Ethiopia contributed to the Red Sea coffee trade during the eighteenth century, and it seems likely that coffee was exported from Enarya as well as from Harar. The kingdom of Shawa was well situated to exploit the development of coffee exports from the south-western highlands, and they would have assisted Shawa's efforts to distance itself from upheavals further north during the Zamana Masafent. The coffee trade may therefore have been more significant in the rise of Shawa in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries than historians have hitherto allowed.


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