Arthur Conan Doyle in Mesmeric Edinburgh and Hypnotic London

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-330
Author(s):  
Gordon Bates
Keyword(s):  
Medical Professional ◽  
Scientific Investigation ◽  
Scientific Methodology ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Psychical Research ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The University ◽  
Society For Psychical Research

Arthur Conan Doyle's spiritualist interests are often viewed today as idiosyncratic for a medical professional and anachronistic for the late Victorian era. However, historians of the era recognise that there was widespread fascination at this time in the possibility of communicating with the dead and the development of extraordinary mental powers like telepathy. Conan Doyle studied medicine in Edinburgh where the study of mesmerism and its role in therapy continued for much longer than the rest of Britain. The university and medical school produced most of the major names of British medical mesmerism including the physician James Braid, who coined the term hypnotism. By the late nineteenth century, there were many distinguished physicians and scientists who shared Conan Doyle's spiritualist views. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was the elite London association that investigated these possibilities using a scientific methodology. Hypnotism and the trance state were important tools in this study. Over the course of his thirty-six-year membership, Conan Doyle's convictions strengthened. The backdrop of Edinburgh and mesmerism is key to Conan Doyle's story ‘ John Barrington Cowles’ (1884) , while the scientific investigation of hypnotism described in The Parasite (1894) relies upon his experiences with London's SPR based in Dean's Yard, Westminster, and Hanover Square in Mayfair.

Replication, re-placing and naval science in comparative context, c.1868–1904

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
DON LEGGETT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Scientific Investigation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Test Tank ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Engineering Practices ◽  
The University

AbstractThe test tank broadly embodied the late nineteenth-century endeavour to ‘use science’ in industry, but the meaning given to the tank differed depending on the experienced communities that made it part of their experimental and engineering practices. This paper explores the local politics surrounding three tanks: William Froude's test tank located on his private estate in Torquay (1870), the Denny tank in Dumbarton (1884) and the University of Michigan test tank (1903). The similarities and peculiarities of test tank use and interpretation identified in this paper reveal the complexities of naval science and contribute to the shaping of an alternative model of replication. This model places the emphasis on actors at sites of replication that renegotiated the meaning of the original Froude tank, and re-placed the local values and conditions which made it a functional instrument of scientific investigation.All the European [test tank] stations are modelled on the station at Haslar; [yet] each station had its own individuality which I will try to throw into relief, avoiding tedious repetitions or comparisons.1

Health

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arna Bontemps
Keyword(s):  
Social Services ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Health Conditions ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Training School ◽  
Tuberculosis Patients ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The University

This chapter looks at the history of Provident Hospital, which had been started by Negro doctors in the late nineteenth century to address the poor health conditions among Negroes in Chicago, with particular emphasis on its role in addressing the high mortality rates due to tuberculosis on the South Side during the period. It begins with an overview of Provident Hospital, which opened in 1891 with thirteen beds and the first training school for Negro nurses in the United States, and considers some of its doctors, led by Dr. Daniel Williams. It then discusses Provident's alliance with the University of Chicago that established the hospital as a recognized educational center, along with its affiliation with the city's important social agencies through its Social Services Department. It also describes Provident's initiative to solve the problem of proper hospitalization of tuberculosis patients in Chicago through its Department of Medicine in collaboration with white physicians and social workers.

scholarly journals Erlendur Haraldsson: An Appreciation

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-136
Author(s):  
Jim Tucker
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
University Of Virginia ◽  
Psychical Research ◽  
Detailed Statistical Analysis ◽  
American Society ◽  
Deathbed Visions ◽  
Returning To School ◽  
The University ◽  
Society For Psychical Research ◽  
Landmark Study

Erlendur Haraldsson, a prolific researcher who made a number of major contributions in various areas of parapsychology and survival research, died in Reykjavik on November 22, 2020 at the age of 89. Born near Reykjavik, Erlendur studied philosophy in college, but his interest in understanding more about the world began before that. When he was 15, he had an experience during a heavy storm when the sun suddenly shone through the clouds and lit up pebbles on the banks of the nearby shore. As the light reflected off the pebbles, Erlendur sensed being filled with light himself in a way that was immense and beyond words. In an interview with Michael Tymn (2015), he said that a vivid trace of that feeling stayed with him forever and that after that, he never doubted that there was a superior reality. Following college, he worked for three years, mostly as a journalist, before returning to school to study psychology, eventually earning a PhD under Hans Bender in Freiburg. After that, he spent a year working at J. B. Rhine’s parapsychology center in Durham, North Carolina, followed by an internship in clinical psychology at the University of Virginia, where he met Ian Stevenson. He and Stevenson studied an Icelandic medium together, introducing Erlendur to the topic of mediumship which he would return to in subsequent decades. Following his internship, he entered the field with a bang. Karlis Osis, the director of research of the American Society for Psychical Research, invited Erlendur to join him in a large study of deathbed visions. They surveyed hundreds of doctors and nurses in both the United States and India about events they had witnessed in their patients. What resulted was a landmark study, one that exemplified the best the field has to offer—detailed statistical analysis along with compelling individual reports. One striking example involved a two-and-a-half year old boy whose mother had died six months before. The respondent wrote, “He was lying there very quiet. He just sat himself up, and he put his arms out and said, ‘Mama,’ and fell back [dead]” (Osis and Haraldsson, 1977, p. 53).  Osis and Haraldsson found that the data did not support known medical or psychological causes of hallucinations. Likewise, the influences of religious or other cultural factors could not be used to explain away the phenomena.

scholarly journals Brief History of Islamic Civilization from Its Genesis in the Late Nineteenth Century to Its Institutional Entrenchment

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-173
Author(s):  
Kevin Van Bladel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
General Education ◽  
Social Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Islamic Civilization ◽  
The University

This article sketches the early history of Islamic civilization from its genesis in the late nineteenth century to its institutionalization in the twentieth. Key moments include its enshrinement in journals and a monumental encyclopedia and the flight of European Semitists to the United States. Its institutionalization in the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Chicago in 1956 created a successful model for the subsequent dissemination of Islamic civilization. Working in a committee on general education (the core curriculum) in the social sciences at the University of Chicago, Marshall Hodgson inaugurated Islamic civilization as a subject of university study that was not just for specialists but available to American college students as fulfilling a basic requirement in a liberal arts education. Many other universities followed this practice. Since then, Islamic civilization has come to be shared by the educated public. Today it is an internationally accepted and wellfunded entity that confers contested social power but still lacks analytical power. 

Elder Brothers of the University: Early Vice Presidents in Late Nineteenth-Century Universities

2004 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana Nidiffer ◽  
Timothy Reese Cain
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vice Presidents ◽  
University Of Illinois ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The University

If he may not be called the Father of the University of Illinois, he was at least its elder brother, intimately acquainted with its aims, character, and history, the depository of traditions, the friend, counselor, guide, and trusted confident of its successive presidents and of its trustees… long may he live in these halls and on this campus, in memory, in spirit, in example, and in gratitude and honor of all good men.-Stephen A. Forbes, 1916

Lampreys, lungfish and elasmobranchs: Cambridge zoology and the politics of animal selection

2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
HELEN BLACKMAN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
International Travel ◽  
Individual Development ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Trees ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The University ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Cambridge School

AbstractThe Cambridge school of animal morphology dominated British zoology in the late nineteenth century. Historians have argued that they were very successful until the death of their leader F. M. Balfour in 1882, when the school all but died with him. This paper argues that their initial success came about because their work fitted well with the university in the 1870s and 1880s. They attempted to trace evolutionary trees by studying individual development. To do this they needed access to species they considered primitive. Balfour made use of his social networks to aid the school and to collect the specimens they needed for their work. The school has been portrayed as failing in the 1890s when students rejected dry laboratory-bound studies. However, a new generation of researchers who followed Balfour had to travel extensively if they were to obtain the organisms they needed. International travel was popular amongst zoologists and the Cambridge school developed their own extensive networks. A new breed of adventurer–zoologists arose, but because of the school's tenuous position within the university they were unable to equal Balfour's success.

scholarly journals Illustrator Extraordinaire: Bechtel Fellow Enthralled by Arthur Rackham

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Bridgid Mangan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
University Of Florida ◽  
Flickering Light ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The University

These are the words of a young C. S. Lewis, who was deeply impressed by the “tender, flickering light of imagination”2 conveyed in the watercolor images by Rackham, the late nineteenth-century artist. Upon entering the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida, I felt the same anticipation and excitement. There was a shelf of first-edition books, some signed by Rackham himself, awaiting my perusal. As a recipient of the 2016 Louise Seaman Bechtel Fellowship, I had been awarded an exceptional opportunity to explore the works of one of the most admired and influential illustrators of all time.

Adjudication and interpretation in the common law: a century of change

Legal Studies ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Birks
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Success Story ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time

This paper is concerned with one hundred and ten years of legal history. It is a success story. Yet it has, not an unhappy ending, for the end is in the future, but an unhappy present. Markers put down in 1883 and 1983 define the century. The change in question is the modernization of the literature of common law and hence of all the machinery of its interpretative development. Having been kept in shape first by the forms of action and then by a hardening of the doctrine of precedent, in the late nineteenth century the growing mass of case law urgently required to be more rationally ordered and explained. It began to find in the universities the means of achieving that improvement. Analysis, definition and classification, the familiar tools of the university, were brought to bear for the first time on the raw materials of the common law.

Modern Arabic Literature as Seen in the Late Nineteenth Century: Jurji Murqus’s Contribution to Korsh and Kirpichnikov’s Vseobshchaya Istoriya Literatury*

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Kilpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The University ◽  
History Of Literature ◽  
Modern Arabic

This chapter discusses modern Arabic literature as seen in the late nineteenth century by focusing on Jurji Ibrahim Murqus's contribution to Vseobshchaya Istoriya literatury (Universal History of Literature), edited by V. F. Korsh and A. I. Kirpichnikov. Murqus was a Syrian academic migrant who left Damascus in 1860. He studied at the Faculty of Oriental Languages of the University of St Petersburg and taught Arabic at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow. This chapter presents a slightly abridged rendering of Murqus's text, which concentrates on the evolution of the Arabic language, on prose writers and on translators. It also considers Murqus's position where prose genres are concerned, with particular emphasis on his recognition of the significance of travel writing, as well as his views on translation. Finally, it suggests that Mustafa Badawi would have disputed some of Murqus's statements on sound scholarly grounds.

Virginia Stephen’s Uneasy Heritage: Lessons, Readers, and Class

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Rigel Daugherty
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Late Nineteenth

In “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf says she was “born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world” (65). Mark Hussey notes that her parents “knew many of the intellectual luminaries of the late Victorian era well” (ix). Yet Leslie Stephen thought his journalism and dictionary-making put him on the periphery of the “intellectual aristocracy,” preventing him from making a real mark in philosophical or ethical thought. And although Woolf saw her parents as well-to-do (not rich), Stephen was haunted by money worries most of his life. Acutely aware of being an outsider – from her mother’s social ease, her friends’ intellectual agility, and the working classes’ material experiences – Woolf used that outsider status to see and critique class assumptions in herself and others. Yet insider contradictions and compromises abound in her life and work, as many commentators have noted, with sober understanding, spiteful glee, or dismissive shouts. In this paper, I propose to examine Virginia Stephen’s class heritage from the angle Virginia Woolf insists on in Three Guineas, that of the educated man’s daughter. What did Stephen learn from her father about the writer’s “place” in the class system? What did reading and writing do about class barriers? What did Leslie Stephen himself have to say about class in his “Thoughts of an Outsider” columns and elsewhere? How did those lessons affect Virginia Stephen’s experiences with Morley College students? What does Virginia Stephen’s class heritage reveal about class in Virginia Woolf?

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