The Body in Motion: The Image of Man in Physical Education in Late Eighteenth-Century Schnepfenthal

2021 ◽  
pp. 95-111
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Physical Education ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Origins of a Misunderstanding: the Qianlong Emperor's Embargo on Rhubarb Exports to Russia, the Scenario and its Consequences

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chang Che-Chia ◽  
Penelope Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Specific Method ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
The West ◽  
Opium War ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This paper casts light on the myth, current in China before the Opium War, that the Europeans could not survive without rhubarb. The myth has its roots in differences between pharmaceutical theories and material culture in the Chinese and Western traditions. In China, rhubarb was considered a drastic purgative, indicated only in case of grave illness. In the West, in consequence of a specific method of processing, it was regarded as a mild and gentle drug, albeit wonderfully effective in ridding the body of superfluous humoral substances. Thus the same herb acquired completely different images in China and in the West. An important factor that fostered the myth was the Russian government's termination of the rhubarb monopoly in the prelude to the Sino-Russian border conflict in the late eighteenth century. This gave rise to increased smuggling, which was misinterpreted in China as evidence that Russia stood in desperate need of rhubarb. When the border conflict came to an end in 1792, Russia's unusually submissive attitude tended to confirm this misapprehension. This article not only explains why the Qjng government adopted an embargo on rhubarb; it also shows how differing pharmaceutical views influenced international affairs.

scholarly journals El remedio de las pasiones: la construcción de la persona del médico a finales del siglo XVIII / Curing the Passions: Construction of the Physician Persona in the Late Eighteenth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillermo De Eugenio Pérez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Regulation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Crucial Element ◽  
Sick People ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Siglo Xix

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to discuss some features of the physician’s figure in the European context in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. Thus, two documents have been chosen to be analyzed. They are dissertations dealing on the influence and treatment of passions as phenomena related to illness. Besides, their authors (Clément-Joseph Tissot y William Falconer) use their discourses to present themselves as bearers of a key ethical function, the emotional regulation of (sick) people. The hypothesis sustained on this article claims that these therapeutical practices that unfold the power of the physician beyond the domain of the body reaching moral life have been a crucial element for the understanding of the strengthen of the physician’s scientific persona as outcome of a genealogical process. This process implies a set of medical theories about the functioning of the body and the techniques of a scientific beholder, on one side, and, on the other, the constitution of a certain kind of authority grounded on this knowledge and on the growing of a certain kind of intimacy between physician and patient.RESUMENEn este artículo se discuten algunos aspectos de la figura del médico en el contexto europeo hacia finales del siglo XVIII y principios del XIX. Para ello se han escogido dos textos sobre la influencia y tratamiento de las pasiones en relación con las enfermedades, cuyos autores (Clément-Joseph Tissot y William Falconer) usan además el discurso para presentarse a sí mismos en tanto que médicos, como detentadores de una función imprescindible en la regulación ética de los individuos-pacientes. La hipótesis sostenida es que la consolidación del médico a lo largo del siglo XIX como eje central de la sociedad tiene su origen en estos intentos discursivos de extender las prácticas terapéuticas más allá del dominio del cuerpo hacia la vida moral del individuo. Trataremos para ello de dar algunas muestras que ilustren un tramo del proceso genealógico de este tipo particular de persona científica que es el médico en su relación con las pasiones del alma, y veremos cómo este proceso está relacionado con un cierto tipo de conocimiento médico y con la constitución de formas específicas de autoridad y de intimidad entre médico y paciente.

The Machine in the Ghost

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Drury
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Instrument ◽  
Affective Responses ◽  
The Body ◽  
Physical And Mental Health ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Mysteries Of Udolpho

Though famous for its visual effects, the most important feature of Ann Radcliffe’s gothic fiction is its use of mysterious music and indistinct sounds. According to late eighteenth-century vitalist physicians, the nerves vibrated in response to external impressions like the strings on a musical instrument. Alternately pampered and overstimulated by modern conveniences, the nerves lost the ‘tone’ necessary for physical and mental health. With the rise of a new ‘expressive’ aesthetics that emphasized literature’s power, like music, to stimulate affective responses rather than ideas, novels soon became implicated in this discourse. Like ‘ethereal’ instruments such as the Aeolian harp and the glass harmonica, Radcliffe’s narrative machinery was to administer therapeutic vibrations and excite imaginative reveries that reconnected the body to nature’s vital resources. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, however, Radcliffe warns that this machinery, if administered to an already debilitated body, could cause nervous pathologies and excite uncanny hallucinations.

Sensitive limit

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mechthild Fend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Art ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter focuses on the significance of skin in neoclassical art and aesthetics. The most distinctive features of neoclassicism - an emphasis on the contour and a preference for more finished surfaces - are understood as elements crucial for the visual formation and understanding of the human body, its surface and borderlines. The culture of neoclassicism, extending well beyond the realm of art and art discourse, was generally characterised by a heightened concern with the shaping of the body and the safeguarding of its boundaries. Skin as the body's physical demarcation, was increasingly perceived not merely as an envelope and organ, but as the boundary of the self. The chapter considers the new attention to skin and contour in late eighteenth-century French art discourse, in particular in Watelet's and Levesque's Dictionnaire des beaux-arts. It equally looks at the discussion of membranes and the definition of skin as ‘sensitive limit‘ in the works of anatomist Xavier Bichat and analyses a set of portraits by Jacques-Louis David painted in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

scholarly journals Pigott’s Private Eye: Radicalism and Sexual Scandal in Eighteenth-Century England

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 247-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Society ◽  
Political Criticism ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Revolutionary Violence ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Private Eye ◽  
Jockey Club

Abstract Charles Pigott hailed from a Shropshire gentry family that made the transition from Jacobitism to Jacobinism in the eighteenth-century. A bon vivant and man of the turf, Pigott scandalised the establishment by exposing the decadent habits of the landed aristocracy in the Jockey Club and the Female Jockey Club. These scurrilous exposés brought Pigott fame and persecution; they also established him as one of the first radical writers to make political capital out of the "boudoir politics" of the aristocracy. This paper examines the language of defamation in these pamphlets, their antecedents and their political purchase. Although the Jockey Club proved a resounding success, its sequel was less so; and this fact raises the question of why sexual scandal ultimately proved a more potent weapon of political criticism in late-eighteenth century France than in Britain. One reason is related to Britain's counter-revolution, to the reaction of the propertied classes towards French revolutionary violence, however critical they may have been to aristocratic libertinism. But another has to do with the nature of political society in France, the closer articulation between the “noble body” and the body politic. In Britain's more pluralist society, dominated by Parliament rather than the Court, attacks on the morals of the aristocracy were less politically damaging than they were in the France of the ancien regime.

The Disinterment of Milton's Remains

PMLA ◽  
1930 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 1050-1068 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Walker Read
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Church

In 1790 a gruesome incident occurred in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, which incidentally affords evidence as to the reputation of Milton in the late eighteenth century. A body, thought to be that of the poet, was disinterred and for two days despoiled outrageously by souvenir-hunters. The question whether the body was or was not that of Milton was much disputed at the time and has remained unsettled ever since. Masson does not so much as allude to the affair and its discreditable and distasteful character has resulted in a glozing suppression of truth.

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