Preparing for the Pox: A Theory of Smallpox in Bengal and Britain

2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 304-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harish Naraindas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Medical Theory ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

This essay is to be conceived in two parts. The first part is an exegesis of an eighteenth-century tract on the practice of smallpox inoculation in Bengal written by a Scottish medic. Cited repeatedly in the contemporary history and anthropology of smallpox in India, it has been invariably used to highlight the technique of inoculation in eighteenth-century India. Caught in disciplinary cleaving between anthropology and history, its original import has not been addressed. The exegesis in restoring the text to its intended import, argues that it offers a theory of smallpox, and in this theory the technique of inoculation is a moment in larger therapeutics. The latter-day privileging of this moment has resulted in seeing the nineteenth-century as a standoff between variolation (smallpox inoculation) and vaccination. The exegesis, however, recasts this as a passage from a therapeutics to a pure prophylactics that caccination represents. Having restored what I think is the central concern of the essay, I then begin to ask whether the essay is actually about the manner of inoculating for the smallpox in Bengal as Holwell says it is or is it actually about its practice in Britain. It is this very restoration, when we locate the essay in 18th century Britain, that allows us, in the latter part of the essay, to to see that not only is the theoretical articulation "induced" by his audience, but also every detail of the description of the practice , which has hitherto been seen as a description determined by his experience in India, is equally induced and determined by his location in Britain . While this could lead me to argue that Holwell's essay has nothing to do with India, I suggest that what the text effects, if not represents, is a kind of translation : one that is both possible and enabled by the fact that the kind of medical theory and practice that underlies disease and its cure is similar - not identical - in India and Britain.

scholarly journals ‘A Supreme Fiction’: Michael Fried and Art Criticism

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-102
Author(s):  
Alison Green
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
French Painting ◽  
Supreme Fiction ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
Prior Relationship

One of the striking aspects of the trenchant legacy of Michael Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’ is its status as a piece of art criticism. Widely perceived as difficult and personal, philosophical and explicatory, doxa or sermon, the essay stands out. To explore its singularity, this article compares Fried’s conception of the period criticism of 18th-century French painting in his book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980) and the method of criticism enacted in ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) which he saw as connected. The author pursues this and other crossings between Fried’s art historical writings and art criticism, tracking it to an extended endnote in Fried’s Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (2002). ‘Art and Objecthood’ is a key essay in this story aimed at Fried’s thinking about criticism, its history, theory and practice. Doing this matters because it puts the critic in a particular relation to art and to Fried’s idea of an ‘ontologically prior relationship between painting and the beholder’.

Placed Bodies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marli F. Weiner ◽  
Mazie Hough
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Medical Theory

This chapter examines how physicians developed the concept of place to reconcile the complexities of race and sex when defining bodies and their health and sicknesses. In the increasingly contested political arena of the antebellum years, southern physicians knew that their work would most likely be received favorably if it reinforced the region's distinctiveness. Awareness that some places were inherently unhealthy and that some people were more likely to get sick in them was part of the anecdotal medical lore that informed physicians' thinking about bodies as placed. Doctors were well aware that southerners fell victim to different diseases and had to be treated differently from people elsewhere in the nation. Thus, doctors argued that a specifically southern medical theory and practice was necessary. This chapter explores how nineteenth-century physicians seeking to understand the consequences of placed bodies invoked the South's climate and the concept of acclimation to explain disease. It shows that laypeople shared physicians' convictions that medicine was specific to place and that bodies were shaped by their environment.

scholarly journals THE DNEPER UKRAINE TRADITION IN THE SACRED ARCHITECTURE OF DON REGION IN THE 18TH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-228
Author(s):  
Chelombitko O. ◽  
◽  
Sentymrei Yu. ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
Materials Analysis ◽  
Sacred Architecture ◽  
Central Volume ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Architectural Tradition

On the basis of historical graphic materials analysis, a number of Don region sacral objects were identified as those whose style and character are undoubtedly connected with the traditions of Dnieper Ukraine architecture. The influence of the Dnieper region architecture in this region is mainly associated with the main military cathedral in Cherkassk (now Starocherkassk), but, the presented materials shows a much wider scale of this phenomenon within the framework of wooden construction. Has been ascertained, that Dnieper architectural tradition is present in the whole territory of the Don region, and not only in those close to Zaporizhia and Slobozhanshchyna (Sloboda Ukraine). It is characterized by the combination of planning "octagons" (“vosmeryk”) on the principles of axial and centric symmetry, pyramid composition, accentuation of the central volume by the highest dome and more. Characteristic differences include some deviations from symmetry and the presence of a ground elevation. It is noted that among the whole complex of objects related to the Ukrainian cultural influence in the present territories of the Russian Federation (Kuban, Starodub region, East Sloboda Ukraine, Siberia, etc.), the Don region is the least researched for the identification and analysis of architectural objects in the solutions of which are traced to the Dnieper Ukraine signs. This is due primarily to the fact that, with the exception of a few stone ones, such objects ceased to exist during the nineteenth century, being replaced by new structures that has a completely different style. Since such buildings ceased to exist by the end of the nineteenth century, it has been determined that the prospective areas of further research are the study of graphic materials and documents, photographs, memories and more. Also important is the discovery of data pertaining to construction in the Don region before the eighteenth century, when its ties with the Dnieper and especially Zaporizhzhia were no less close.

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.

Nature, poetry and medicine in late 18th century England: a unified perspective of Erasmus Darwin

1976 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 537-537
Author(s):  
M. McNEIL
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Nature Poetry ◽  
Medicine And Philosophy ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Medical Theory ◽  
Lunar Society Of Birmingham ◽  
Organizational Principles ◽  
Century Science ◽  
Erasmus Darwin

Erasmus Darwin was the focus and embodiment of provincial England in his day. Renowned as a physician, he spent much of his life at Lichfield. He instigated the founding of the Lichfield Botanic Society, which provided the first English translation of the works of Linnaeus, and established a botanic garden; the Lunar Society of Birmingham; the Derby Philosophical Society; and two provincial libraries. A list of Darwin's correspondents and associates reads like a "who's who" of eighteenth century science, industry, medicine and philosophy. His poetry was also well received by his contemporaries and he expounded the evolutionary principles of life. Darwin can be seen as an English equivalent of Lamarck, being a philosopher of nature and human society. His ideas have been linked to a multitude of movements, including the nosological movement in Western medicine, nineteenth century utilitarianism, Romanticism in both Britain and Germany, and associationist psychology. The relationships between various aspects of Darwin's interests and the organizational principles of his writings were examined. His poetical form and medical theory were not peripheral to his study of nature but intrinsically linked in providing his contemporaries with a panorama of nature. A richer, more integrated comprehension of Erasmus Darwin as one of the most significant and representative personalities of his era was presented.

Aristocracy about 1760: Theory and Practice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Rank ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
Social Utility ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
General Consensus ◽  
The People ◽  
Important Sense

This chapter considers the prevailing notion in the eighteenth century that nobility was a necessary bulwark of political freedom. Whether in the interest of a more open nobility or of a more closed and impenetrable nobility, the view was the same. Nobility as such, nobility as an institution, was necessary to the maintenance of a free constitution. There was also a general consensus that parliaments or ruling councils were autonomous, self-empowered, or empowered by history, heredity, social utility, or God; that they were in an important sense irresponsible, free to oppose the King (where there was one), and certainly owing no accounting to the “people.” The remainder of the chapter deals with the uses and abuses of social rank and the problems of administration, recruitment, taxation, and class consciousness.

Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Third ◽  
Opium War ◽  
The Subject

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.

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