Medicine and Narration in the Eighteenth Century

Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Bristol

The President introduced his remarks by a short survey of the social and economic conditions in Bristol in the middle of the eighteenth century, with acknowledgments to Latimer's Annals of Bristol in the eighteenth century, Munro Smith's History of the Bristol Royal Infirmary, and other sources. He quoted from English Social History: " Good doctoring rather than better social conditions was the...

Eighteenth Century Medicine in America

The philosophy of medicine. The early eighteenth century

By title, Lester King's latest book would appear to complement a work which he published in 1970, The road to medical enlightenment, 1650-1695. In that earlier monograph he examined a number of seventeenth-century physicians and scientists-Boyle, van Helmont, Sydenham, Sylvius, Hooke-whose philosophies were seen to culminate in the eclectic synthesis of Friedrich Hoffmann. Although he never exp...

Benjamin Franklin's Wife's Apoplexy and Mid-Eighteenth Century Medicine.

On 16 April 1768, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), then 62 and in England, wrote a letter to his stay-at-home wife, Deborah (Franklin, née Read; 1708–74; Figure 1).1 “Amidst all the sickness and misfortunes of our friends,” he began, “what reason have you and I to bless God, that we at these years enjoy with our children so great a Share of health and so much happiness in other respects.” Franklin ...

Allegory and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century

In a reading of William Blake's frontispiece to “There is no Natural Religion” that draws largely on the history of the allegorical mode, I offer a narrative that explores the creative ways in which Blake illuminated his ideas about the value of Enlightenment thought.