'I Think it Highly Necessary to Have it Done Before They Go Out into the World': Inoculation, Responsibility and Patterns of Familial Transmission of Smallpox

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Leadbeater
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Familial Transmission ◽  
The World ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

This paper examines two research streams. First, it will discuss some contemporary familial perspectives on smallpox inoculation in the eighteenth century. This is followed by a look at the level of provision of the practice in Oxfordshire and some of its contiguous counties. Second, the paper will present some findings on the nature of the transmission of smallpox during local early eighteenth century epidemics in Banbury, Oxfordshire and Aynho, Northamptonshire. Finally, the paper will put forward some conclusions which encompass these two streams.

Advocating Inoculation in the Eighteenth Century: Exemplarity and Quantification

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Eriksen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mass Treatment ◽  
Inoculation Methods ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

ArgumentSmallpox inoculation was introduced in Europe in the early eighteenth century and has been considered the first mass treatment of disease based on practical use of probability calculations and mathematical tools of computation. The article argues that these new approaches were deeply entangled with other rationalities, most emphatically that of exemplarity. Changes in inoculation methods around mid-century gradually changed the conceptualization of disease, seeing all cases as fundamentally equal, and thus making it more relevant to count them. Arithmetic changed the ways of thinking about smallpox epidemics, but new ways of conceptualizing disease were vital to making it a matter of arithmetic at all. The article investigates what happened when numbers and figures were introduced into medical matters: Who did the figures really concern, and what types of argument were they fitted into? How were numbers transformed into metaphors, and how did quantitative argument work together with arguments from exemplarity?

The Musical Activities of the Spalding Gentlemen's Society

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 65-90
Author(s):  
Simon David Iain Fleming
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The World ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
First Time ◽  
Musical Activities

The Spalding Gentlemen's Society is one of the oldest extant learned societies in the world. At the time of its foundation over 300 years ago such societies were popular and membership was viewed as an important attribute of middle-class life. Most societies were short-lived and extant references to them are rare. What sets Spalding over all others is not only its longevity but also the quality of its records, which contain numerous references to music. This article aims to present the musical activities of the Society and to put them into the context of the early eighteenth-century English and European musical world. It begins with a discussion of the annual anniversary concerts and a detailed study of the 1738–46 programmes, commenting on the music performed and those who took part; these programmes are given as appendices. This research is further augmented by an examination of the music-related matters discussed at their meetings and other events that took place in Spalding. It may be impossible to ascertain how unique the Society's musical activities were, but it is rare to have such detail, and this is the first time that these important records, at least in relation to music, have been discussed in any depth.

In the Beginning was Chronology: An Early Eighteenth-Century Attempt to Model the Eschaton on the Creation

1994 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Johanna Roelevink
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
World History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Creation ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
In The Beginning

When T. S. Eliot contemplated the void and the darkness after the Creation, he assumed that there must have been a predetermined moment through which time was made: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning.We are about to meet an early eighteenth-century scholar who tackled the very same problem, the relation between the lapse of’historical’ time and the ultimate meaning of history. But to him, like so many others, time just started with the movement of the stars, which mercifully also provided adequate means for measuring it. In the beginning was chronology. And in its inexorable progress the lapse of time would also in due course spell the end of the world. But when precisely? The answer of our particular scholar to this question sounds deceptively simple. The Bible teaches that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. Again, Holy Scripture reveals that to him one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. So here, by way of analogy, we have the outline of world history. Once having computed the date of the Creation, we can easily deduce that Our Lord Jesus Christ will return on 11 November 1740 to inaugurate his glorious reign.

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.

The Experimental Imagination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tita Chico
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Experimental Observation ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
The World ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Metaphoric Thinking

This book is about experimental imagination in the British Enlightenment. It tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds. Early scientists used metaphor to define the phenomena they studied. They likewise used metaphor to imagine themselves into their roles as experimentalists. Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British literature includes countless references to early science to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge, whose truths challenge the dominant account of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non epistemological innovation of the long eighteenth century. The Experimental Imagination considers traditional scientific writings alongside poems, plays, and prose works by canonical and non-canonical authors to argue that ideas about science facilitated new forms of evidence and authority. The noisy satiric rancor and quiet concern that science generated among science advocates, dramatists, essayists, and poets reveal a doubled epistemological trajectory: experimental observation utilizes imaginative speculation and imaginative fancy enables new forms of understanding. Early scientific practice requires yet often obscures that imaginative impulse, which literary knowledge embraces as a way of understanding the world at large. Reciprocally, the period’s theory of aesthetics arises from the observational protocols of science, ultimately laying claim to literature as epistemologically superior. Early science finds its intellectual and conceptual footing in the metaphoric thinking available through literary knowledge, and literary writers wield science as a trope for the importance and unique insights of literary knowledge.

Newtonian,Converso, and Deist: The Lives of Jacob (Henrique) de Castro Sarmento

1997 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 651-675 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Goldish
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Personal Relationship ◽  
The World ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

The ArgumentJacob (Henrique) de Castro Sarmento was a descendent of New Christians in Portugal who made his way to London in the early eighteenth century. There he professed Judaism openly, but he also advanced his scientific and medical pursuits, becoming particularly enamored of the Newtonian world view. This paper argues that Sarmento's attachment to Judaism was essentially a function of his personal relationship with Hakham David Nieto, and that Sarmento's Judaism was never really the full synthesis of scientific outlook and Jewish theology toward which Nieto pushed him. Rather, after Nieto's death Sarmento identified himself with scientific Newtonianism increasingly openly, while his religious identitly waned. Apparently he found science a more useful outlook in approaching the world, as did many Newtonians of that generation.

PURGING SUGAR-PLUMS FOR CHILDREN, AN ENGLISH PROPRIETARY MEDICATION ADVERTISED IN 1705

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 70 (6) ◽  
pp. 1000-1000
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Skin Disease ◽  
The World ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Medicines For Children

Patent, or proprietary, medicines for children were frequently advertised in early eighteenth century English and American newspapers. A typical example is the following published in the Flying Post, 1-3 January 1705. Purging sugar-plums for children, and others of nice palates, nothing differing in taste, colour, etc. from sugar-plums at the confectioners, having been experienced by thousands to sweeten and purify the blood to admiration, kill worms, cure the green-sickness in maids, pale looks in children, rickets, stomach pains, King's-Evil, scurvies, rheumatisms, dropsies, scabs, itch, tetters [skin disease] etc., good in all cases, where purging is necessary, doing all that is possible to be done by a purging medicine, being the cheapest, safest, and pleasantest purge in the world, fit for persons of all ranks, ages and sexes. Price 1s. the box, to be had only at Mr. Spooner's at the Golden Half-Moon in Buckle-Street in Goodmans-fields near White-Chapel, with directions.

Evangelicals and Unevangelicals: The Contested History of a Word, 1500–1950

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
American History ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Evangelical Identity ◽  
Definition Of

Abstract“Not Evangelical”! and who is this,With serpent’s tongue, that dares the sentence hiss?1—Day K. Lee, Universalist minister, 1841Recent academic use of the word “evangelical” in American history has been surprisingly static. Drawing upon scholars of “evangelicalism,” historians have been tied to an “essentialist,” or doctrinal, definition of evangelicalism that stretches unbroken from the early eighteenth century to the present. Such ahistorical readings, however, obscure a far more interesting and complex reality. This essay argues that from the Protestant Reformation through the early twentieth century, to be “evangelical” was most often a Protestant-inflected way of being in the world, which at times could have multiple, changing, and contested doctrinal associations. It was a flexible and dynamic idiom, intended to communicate a relative biblical authenticity by those who wielded it. In particular, this essay seeks to recover three overlooked dimensions of the use of the word “evangelical”: first, the firmly Protestant and even anti-Catholic implication of the term that spanned the history of Protestantism from the 1520s to the twentieth century; second, the relative authenticity, “true-Christian” usage, which contained within it a strong “primitivist” impulse with reference to New Testament Christianity; and third, the contested nature of the word, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when “evangelical” identity supposedly started to become more recognizable.

Mysticism and Prophecy in Early Eighteenth-Century Scotland

2019 ◽  
Vol 98 (Supplement) ◽  
pp. 333-360
Author(s):  
Michael B. Riordan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Spiritual Discernment ◽  
The World ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Devil

In 1709 a group of prophets arrived in Edinburgh proclaiming that Christ had appeared to redeem the nations. They attracted the interest of a community of self-described mystics. The mystics maintained that Christians had a duty to turn inwards and follow the holy spirit in all that they did and believed that Christ would soon appear in spirit to convert the world to their beliefs. Some, therefore, accepted the prophets as harbingers of the millennium. But other mystics remained unconvinced and maintained that spiritual reformation would not appear by outward signs and wonders. The paper introduces the development of mysticism in Scotland. It then examines the debate which emerged after a group of mystics became converts to the prophets’ cause. It shows how mystical prophets successfully converted both mystics and prophets to their cause. In order to grasp the importance of the divisions within the movement, it recovers the discourse of spiritual discernment, which has been obscured by debates about reason and superstition. The prophets needed to prove to their mystical brethren that they were inspired by God and not by the devil.

Book Reviews

2010 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-178
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Economic Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
George Mason University ◽  
The Invisible

Gregory Clark of University of California, Davis reviews “The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates” by Peter T. Leeson,. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins “Explores the world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century pirates from an economic perspective, focusing on how famous pirate customs resulted from pirates responding rationally to prevailing economic conditions in the pursuit of profits. Discusses the invisible hook; the economics of pirate democracy; the economics of the pirate code; the economics of the Jolly Roger; the economics of pirate torture; the economics of pirate conscription; the economics of pirate tolerance; and the secrets of pirate management. Leeson is BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism in the Department of Economics at George Mason University. Index.”

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