THE FIRST ENGLISH ACCOUNT OF APNEIC ATTACKS IN THE NEWBORN INFANT (1799)

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 612-612
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Newborn Infant ◽  
Castor Oil ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Fourth Edition ◽  
Senior Surgeon

Michael Underwood (1737-1820), the most advanced writer on diseases of children in the eighteenth century, gave the first English account of apneic attacks in the newborn infant in the fourth edition of his Treatise on the Diseases of Children (1799). He wrote: Mr. Hey, senior surgeon to the Infirmary at Leeds, ... reports that an infant born at the full time lay moaning and languid for four or five hours, and was then seized with a fainting fit: in which it continued for half an hour. In this state Mr. Hey found it. It had ceased to breathe except now and then giving a gasp, or sob, and was as pale as a corpse. There was however a sensible pulsation of the heart though feeble and slow, but whether the circulation had been kept up all the time previous to his visit could not be ascertained. As soon as Mr. Hey had time to consider the case he directed the infant's nostrils and temples to be stimulated with the volatile alkali, and when it became capable of swallowing, a few drops of the tinctura valerian. volat. were administered in a teaspoonful of water and repeated at proper intervals; it likewise took a teaspoonsful of the ol. ricini [castor oil]. The child had three other similar attacks in the course of the day, though it had slept composedly between whiles and sucked at the breast. It had seven more fainting fits in the night, two of which were severe ones; but Mr. Hey was not called again till the next morning.

Tom Jones

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Fielding
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fourth Edition ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
History Of

Fielding's comic masterpiece of 1749 was immediately attacked as `A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery'. Indeed, his populous novel overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible humanitarians. At the centre of one of the most ingenious plots in English fiction stands a hero whose actions were, in 1749, as shocking as they are funny today. Expelled from Mr Allworthy's country estate for his wild temper and sexual conquests, the good-hearted foundling Tom Jones loses his money, joins the army, and pursues his beloved across Britain to London, where he becomes a kept lover and confronts the possibility of incest. Tom Jones is rightly regarded as Fielding's greatest work, and one of the first and most influential of English novels. This carefully modernized edition is based on Fielding's emended fourth edition text and offers the most thorough notes, maps, and bibliography. The introduction uses the latest scholarship to examine how Tom Jones exemplifies the role of the novel in the emerging eighteenth-century public sphere.

THE WEIGHT OF THE NEWBORN INFANT ACCORDING TO DESESSARTZ, FRANCE'S LEADING EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PEDIATRICIAN

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 754-754
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Birth Weight ◽  
Newborn Infant ◽  
Born Infant ◽  
Millet Seed ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Period Of Gestation

I have long been puzzled why a biologic statistic so mundane as the birth weight of the newly born infant was ignored by physicians until the end of the seventeenth century. And, even when they began to mention this weight, an erroneously high value was given by almost all the distinguished physicians of the day.1 Proof of this may be found in the following quotation from Jean Charles Desessartz's great pediatric text on the physical upbringing of infants, which was published in Paris in 1760.2 The infant who, in the first days after conception hardly equals the weight of a millet seed, develops little by little in the early months, and finally obtains such a prodigious increase in size, that at about nine months, the usual period of gestation, he weighs 12 livres or 13 pounds (livre = 489.5 gr)3 and at times as much as 14 livres or 15 pounds.

The Académie and Its Dictionaries under the Old Regime

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Fitzsimmons
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Body ◽  
French Language ◽  
Fourth Edition ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Berlin Academy ◽  
The French Revolution

Because of criticism of its dictionary, the Académie decided to revise the work rather than begin work on a grammar. It adhered to this pattern throughout the eighteenth century and produced new editions in 1718, 1740, and 1762. The dictionary became the definitive instrument of the French language and enacted changes in it, especially in new spellings introduced in the fourth edition in 1762. Early in the eighteenth century, after he published a pamphlet that criticized Louis XIV, the Académie expelled the abbé de Saint-Pierre, who had wanted the body to assume a larger public policy role. By the latter part of the century, however, its membership included many philosophes. In 1784 Antoine de Rivarol won the prize of the Berlin Academy for his essay on the universality of the French language, heightening the importance of the dictionary, but the fifth edition had not appeared when the French Revolution began in 1789.

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