The Doctor's Casebook – A Process of Discovery

2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 36-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
S Fraser ◽  
C Ayres

Background and Aims A bound manuscript describing the medical cases seen by a mid-eighteenth century Scottish doctor was discovered in the possession of the first author's family. The identity of the doctor is not revealed in the book. The aims were to identify the doctor and understand the significance of this book in the context of Scottish medical history of that period. Methods The process of investigation involved transcribing the book in order to undertake detailed study of the text, with particular focus on style of writing, location, and the names of patients and doctors mentioned. This information was then used in searches of the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London and the Department of Special Libraries and Archives of the University of Aberdeen as well as searches of the internet. Results The author was discovered to be a doctor working in Aberdeenshire in the middle of the eighteenth century. His style of writing suggests an educational purpose, with a particular interest in midwifery, and evidence of teaching midwifery techniques to students. He associated with other prominent local doctors of the time and was aware of the current thinking being put forward by his contemporaries. He had a particular association with Dr John Gregory, with whom he not only worked, but whose extended family he also treated. Conclusions The author of this casebook was identified as Dr David Skene, and this adds to our knowledge of this important figure of the Scottish Enlightenment who had a particular interest in midwifery and campaigned for the proper instruction of midwives

Author(s):  
James Moore ◽  
Michael Silverthorne

Gershom Carmichael was a teacher and writer of pivotal importance for the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, predecessor of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Carmichael introduced the natural law tradition of Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke to the moral philosophy courses he taught at the University of Glasgow (1694–1729). His commentaries on Samuel Pufendorf’s work on the duty of man and citizen (1718 and 1724) made his teaching available to a wider readership in Great Britain and in Europe. He also composed an introduction to logic, Breviuscula Introductio ad Logicam, (1720 and 1722) and a brief system of natural theology, Synopsis Theologiae Naturalis (1729).


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-350
Author(s):  
BILL JENKINS

AbstractThis paper draws on material from the dissertation books of the University of Edinburgh's student societies and surviving lecture notes from the university's professors to shed new light on the debates on human variation, heredity and the origin of races between 1790 and 1835. That Edinburgh was the most important centre of medical education in the English-speaking world in this period makes this a particularly significant context. By around 1800 the fixed natural order of the eighteenth century was giving way to a more fluid conception of species and varieties. The dissolution of the ‘Great Chain of Being’ made interpretations of races as adaptive responses to local climates plausible. The evidence presented shows that human variation, inheritance and adaptation were being widely discussed in Edinburgh in the student circles around Charles Darwin when he was a medical student in Edinburgh in the 1820s. It is therefore no surprise to find these same themes recurring in similar form in the evolutionary speculations in his notebooks on the transmutation of species written in the late 1830s during the gestation of his theory of evolution.


1983 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary L. McDowell

Adam Ferguson was one of several moral philosophers who contributed to the Scottish Enlightenment, a period aptly described as one of “remarkable efflorescence.” The works of Ferguson and his fellow Scotsmen — Adam Smith, David Hume, Dugald Stewart, Lord Kames, Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid — were widely distributed, seriously read, and vigorously debated during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The greatest contribution of this Scottish school to the history of political thinking was the refinement of the idea of commercial republicanism, the synthesis of modern notions of polity and economy.


Author(s):  
Kirwin R. Shaffer

This concluding chapter explores the legacy of anarchism in Puerto Rico. While anarchist agitation and organizing came to an end in the early 1920s, individual anarchists continued to write to anarchist publications in New York and Havana. In addition, the global economic recession that began in 2008, coupled with efforts by the Puerto Rican government and the Universidad de Puerto Rico to impose new fees on university students in 2010, gave birth to new interest in anarchism on the island as anarchist groups took to the internet, the cafés, and the university grounds. They began working with other groups in cross-sectarian alliances, offering classes on anarchism, reviving anarchist theatre, and drawing attention to the ravages of joint state–corporate attempts to seize private lands. In short, these new Black Flag Boricuas were resurrecting in the present the very history of anarchist agitation and antiauthoritarianism developed a century earlier.


2012 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Sanjoy Bhattacharya

Medical History is embarking on an exciting new journey. Thanks to the Wellcome Trust, the ownership of this journal has passed to Cambridge University Press. The Press is committed to running the publication as its flagship journal in the history of medicine, related sciences and health, and is keen to offer authors full flexibility when it comes to publishing and archiving their articles. Medical History's editorial office has moved to the Centre for Global Health Histories at the University of York, which is housed within its Department of History; the Centre and Department are honoured to be associated to this world-leading journal.


2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-506
Author(s):  
Mark Charles Nolan

This paper agrees with Friedrich August Hayek’s assertion in his 1945 Dublin lecture that the importance of Dutch physician Bernard Mandeville’s role in the history of economics had been overlooked and with his 1966 London lecture’s assertion that Mandeville’s important contribution qualified him as a master mind. Paul Sakmann’s and Albert Schatz’s studies of Mandeville’s eighteenth-century allegorical Fable of the Bees satire were acknowledged by Hayek as having influenced his formulation and development of the theory of spontaneous order extended from Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. Each of these two writers’ contribution to Mandeville and spontaneous order theory is considered as well as proposing a new source for the term “spontaneous order”—Schatz’s 1907‘le principe d’ordre spontané.’


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Fanny Marcon ◽  
Giulio Peruzzi ◽  
Sofia Talas

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, new lectures in natural philosophy based on direct and immediate demonstrations began to spread through Europe. Within this context, a chair of experimental philosophy was created at the University of Padua in 1738, and the new professor, Giovanni Poleni, established a Cabinet of Physics, which became very well known in eighteenth-century Europe. In the following two centuries, Poleni’s successors continued to acquire thousands of instruments used for teaching and research, which today are held at the Museum of the History of Physics of the University of Padua. The present paper describes the main peculiarities of the collection, comprising instruments from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. We also discuss the current acquisition policy of the museum, aimed at collecting material evidence of the research and teaching activities in physics that are carried out in Padua today. We will outline both the local peculiarities of the collection and its international dimension, based on the contacts that have been established throughout the centuries between Padua and the international scientific community. Some aspects of the circulation of scientific knowledge in Europe and beyond will thus also emerge.


Philosophy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Smith

Adam Smith (1723–1790) has become known as the father of economics. His reputation as the author of the Wealth of Nations has eclipsed his contributions to other areas of philosophy. Smith was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow and a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. His Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) was well-regarded at the time but faded from the philosophical canon in the 19th century and has only recently been subject to a revival of interest among philosophers. Smith’s thought was dismissed as moral psychology or as proto-utilitarian political economy until a revival in interest stemming largely from the publication of a critical edition of his works in the 1970s. Recent years have seen a renaissance in interest in Smith among moral philosophers. This has been accompanied by the first serious analysis of Smith’s thinking on rhetoric and the philosophy of science. This bibliography focuses on Smith’s moral and political philosophy. There is a very large literature on the technical details his economic theory and his contribution to the history of that discipline, but that will be mentioned here only when illuminating for discussions of his moral and political thinking.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 919-949
Author(s):  
BRUCE BUCHAN

AbstractThis paper will present a comparative analysis of the ethnographic writings of three colonial travellers trained in medicine at the University of Edinburgh: William Anderson (1750–78), Archibald Menzies (1754–1842) and Robert Brown (1773–1858). Each travelled widely beyond Scotland, enabling them to make a series of observations of non-European peoples in a wide variety of colonial contexts. William Anderson, Archibald Menzies and Robert Brown in particular travelled extensively in the Pacific with (respectively) James Cook on his second and third voyages (1771–8), with George Vancouver (1791–5) and with Matthew Flinders (1801–3). Together, their surviving writings from these momentous expeditions illustrate a growing interest in natural-historical explanations for diversity among human populations. Race emerged as a key concept in this quest, but it remained entangled with assumptions about the stadial historical progress or “civilization” of humanity. A comparative examination of their ethnographic writings thus presents a unique opportunity to study the complex interplay between concepts of race, savagery and civilization in the varied colonial contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment.


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