{ Epilogue }

The discourse of the picturesque reshaped how Americans understood their landscape, but it largely ended in the mid-1870s. The decline of the picturesque can be illustrated in two emblematic works: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s 1872 short story “In Search of the Picturesque” and William Cullen Bryant’s enormous 1874 scenery book Picturesque America. Woolson’s fictional story is a satire of travel in which a young urban woman accompanies her grandfather to the countryside “in search of the picturesque” and instead only finds development. This story signals the shift in literary interest in rural subjects toward regionalism. Regionalism disavowed the earlier focus on picturesque landscapes, instead featuring distinctive regional dialects and cultural practices that reflected the newly created social sciences. Bryant’s Picturesque America was a Reconstruction-era project aimed at reconnecting the divided nation through a nonhierarchical unification under the sign of “picturesque.” Adding not only the West but also the South to the compendium of American scenery, Picturesque America imagined the entire nation as picturesque. In this formulation, the picturesque became synonymous with landscape in general. Although the picturesque lost its appeal as an authoritative discourse for shaping the American landscape in the latter third of the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates that the spaces that dominated American life in the twentieth century and beyond are owed almost entirely to the transformative project of the mid-nineteenth-century picturesque.

Glasgow as a Centre for the Arts, Science and Medicine

This chapter showcases Glasgow as a truly important, often central, hub of the Scottish Enlightenment. Beginning with Francis Hutcheson’s revolutionary ideas and teaching style, the chapter traces the activities of the Foulis brothers, William Cullen, William Hunter, Tobias Smollett, and James Watt.

“Alkaline Doctor” and “A Dangerous Innovator”

In 1795 Barker read Lavoisier’s chemistry, experimented on tainted meat made edible by soaking in alkalis, and began using alkaline therapy such a limewater. He wrote about this to Samuel Mitchill and Benjamin Rush, telling them that he had been called a “dangerous innovator.” A brief history of the acid/alkali debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries includes information about Otto Tachenius, John Colbatch, Hermann Boerhaave, George Ernst Stahl, William Cullen, Joseph Black, and Antoine Lavoisier. Barker wrote about his experiments, azotic air (nitrogen), and his difficulty understanding the mechanism of this apparently successful therapy. His results were published in the Medical Repository, beginning a correspondence with Samuel Latham Mitchill, professor of chemistry at Columbia University. Contributors to the discussion of alkalis included David Hosack, Thomas Beddoes and James Watt, Humphry Davy, and Matthew Carey. Comments by Charles Rosenberg, John Harley Warner, Lester King, and others help us make sense of medical science and the acid/alkali battle.

**C10** Chap. 1.

The etymology of the word “consumption” is followed by a discussion of the anatomy of the respiratory system and a quote by William Cullen on the frequency of hemoptysis (coughing up blood) in the disease. Barker reports on the incidence of consumption in women and concludes that the disease was much more frequent in both sexes than in former years, owing in part to neglect and delay on the part of the patient, changes in mode of living and dress, and the increased use of spiritous liquors among both sexes. He argues that consumption was more common in New England in part due to “the cold changeable air of our variable climate” and to hereditary differences between the populations of New England and states further south. He considers heredity the issue in his loss of two children, at three weeks and at six months, both born of consumptive mothers.

The Old Medicine and the New: Why Did Barker Write This Manuscript, for Whom Was It Written, and Why Was It Not Published?

This section begins with a very brief overview of early medical philosophies leading up to Barker’s time, when science was developing an important place in American intellectual life. There was a gradual increase in the cultural authority of “regular” medical education by preceptorship, didactic medical school lectures, and medical licensure, as opposed to self-help or domestic medicine, sectarian medicine, the Thomsonians, homeopaths, and others. William Cullen, Benjamin Rush, and John Brown influenced medicine at the end of the eighteenth century. Pierre Louis in Paris, who had become a major influence on American medicine during the first third of the nineteenth century, believed that “medicine is a science of observation” and a “rigid method” is essential for medicine to improve. Careful case reports, necessary for practice and teaching, were facilitated by the numerical method. The Physician’s Case Book, published by Allen & Ticknor, Boston, in 1832, was an attempt to help physicians to record and organize their case reports. Possible reasons Barker failed to publish his manuscript include finances, competition from other books, and the rapidly changing medical beliefs during the first third of the nineteenth century. A comparison is made to Noah Webster’s 1832 decision to abandon the revised edition of his 1799 book on epidemics.