The contribution of the Scottish doctor Robert Erskine to the development of Russian medicine in the 18th century

The Scottish doctor Robert Erskine (1677–1718) became Chief Doctor of Russia and personal physician to Tsar Peter the Great. Extensive archival material documents his remarkable career. From schooling in the village of Alva and apprenticeship to an Edinburgh apothecary, he went on to study medicine in Paris and Utrecht and was admitted to the Royal Society in London. Recruited into the service of the Tsar, to whom he became a trusted friend and counsellor, Erskine played a central role in the modernisation of Russian medicine, pharmacy and natural science in the early 18th century. His untimely death at age 41 was marked with a state funeral in St Petersburg. Some historians in Russia assert that in their country, the development of medicine and the natural sciences took place without the transitional stages of iatrochemistry and iatrophysics which characterised the shift in scientific thinking throughout Europe in the early modern period. This study of archival records shows that Erskine held iatrophysical and iatrochemical views in common with his European contemporaries. His influence ensured that Russia was thoroughly involved in European developments in science and medicine in the 18th century.

O pewnym sposobie użycia form deminutywnych w języku rosyjskim XVII – początku XVIII wieku

On a certain way of using diminutive forms in 17th – early 18th century Russian. The author discusses suffixal appellative diminutive personal nouns which appeared in the etiquette formulations of Russian private correspondence dating from the 17th – early 18th century. The definition of the diminutives has been presented, with particular attention paid to the modification of the meaning of derivatives by isolating the suffixes in their structure. The same diminutive, when used to describe people, can have both a hypocoristic and a contemptuous meaning. Hypocoristic names, as a rule, define the recipient and his/her family members, while the contemptuous names describe the sender and their relatives. The most common suffixes are: -ка/-ко, -ок/-ек, -ишка/-ишко, -ушка/-ушко, -ошка, -онка, -ец, -ица. The history of the type of derivatives with the suffix -ишк- is particularly interesting. Keywords: diminutive noun, hypocoristic noun, suffix, derivative, appellative noun, epistolary etiquette, private correspondence

Loomislugu filosoofias: hr Berkeley vastus Lady Percivalile

The paper discusses George Berkeley’s metaphysical account of the Creation in his work Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713). As we know from Berkeley’s correspondence, his detailed attempt to show that his immaterialist philosophy is compatible with the Mosaic description of the Creation was occasioned by an objection from the wife of his friend Sir John Percival. According to Berkeley’s philosophy, only minds and ideas exist. Physical things such as books and trees are mere collections of ideas in human minds. No thing can exist unless there is a mind to perceive it. Yet the Mosaic story states that many things were created and existed before humans came into being. Lady Percival pointed out that Berkeley’s view makes it hard to understand how things could be created if there were no human beings around to perceive them. In response, Berkeley offered a sophisticated metaphysical construct in which the creation of the physical world is interpreted as God’s decree to produce certain kinds of ideas in potential perceivers. The paper aims to show how Berkeley’s response to Lady Percival’s objection reflects the complicated relationship between philosophy and revealed religion in the early 18th century. Berkeley’s commitment to biblical truth sets significant limits to his philosophical speculation.

Planar Typical Bézier Curves Made Simple

Recently, He et al. derived several remarkable properties of the so-called typical Bézier curves, a subset of constrained Bézier curves introduced by Mineur et al. In particular, He et al. proved that such curves display at most one curvature extremum, give an explicit formula of the parameter at the extremum, and show that subdividing a curve at this point furnishes two new typical curves. We recall that typical curves amount to segments of a special family of sinusoidal spirals, curves already studied by Maclaurin in the early 18th century and whose properties are well-known. These sinusoidal spirals display only one curvature extremum (i.e., vertex), whose parameter is simply that corresponding to the axis of symmetry. Subdividing a segment at an arbitrary point, not necessarily the vertex, always yields two segments of the same spiral, hence two typical curves.

Lost in Translation – Typographic variation in loanword surrounded punctuation positions

In German printings of the early 18th century, the shift from the hitherto dominant sentence-dividing punctuation mark, the virgule, to the comma, takes place astonishingly rapidly. It is also astonishing that until recently, research has barely devoted itself to this phenomenon, even though it is at least a turning point in the history of the highest-frequency punctuation mark in German writing. The paper examines to what extent the transition from the use of the virgule to the comma is carried out in a phase-specific manner. Previous samples have indicated the influence of the font choice on the choice of punctuation: Printers or typesetters in the early 18th century set the comma especially in the environment of the Antiqua script, which is used to graphically label non-native words or syntagms. Is this a kind of “gateway” to the comma? By means of a corpus analysis in micro-diachronic sections, the status of the virgule/comma variation will be associated with the typographic variation in terms of the use of Latin Antiqua type and the German type.