Feverish Bodies Enlightened Minds

Author : Thomas Apel
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804799636
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds written by Thomas Apel and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-30 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1793 to 1805, yellow fever devastated U.S. port cities in a series of terrifying epidemics. The search for the cause and prevention of the disease involved many prominent American intellectuals, including Noah Webster and Benjamin Rush. This investigation produced one of the most substantial and innovative outpourings of scientific thought in early American history. But it also led to a heated and divisive debate—both political and theological—around the place of science in American society. Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds opens an important window onto the conduct of scientific inquiry in the early American republic. The debate between "contagionists," who thought the disease was imported, and "localists," who thought it came from domestic sources, reflected contemporary beliefs about God and creation, the capacities of the human mind, and even the appropriate direction of the new nation. Through this thoughtful investigation of the yellow fever epidemic and engaging examination of natural science in early America, Thomas Apel demonstrates that the scientific imaginations of early republicans were far broader than historians have realized: in order to understand their science, we must understand their ideas about God.

Author : Richard J. Kahn
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190053267
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Diseases in the District of Maine 1772 - 1820 written by Richard J. Kahn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeremiah Barker practiced medicine in rural Maine up until his retirement in 1818. Throughout his practice of fifty years, he documented his constant efforts to keep up with and contribute to the medical literature in a changing medical landscape, as practice and authority shifted from historical to scientific methods. He performed experiments and autopsies, became interested in the new chemistry of Lavoisier, risked scorn in his use of alkaline remedies, studied epidemic fever and approaches to bloodletting, and struggled to understand epidemic fever, childbed fever, cancer, public health, consumption, mental illness, and the "dangers of spirituous liquors." Dr. Barker intended to publish his Diseases in the District of Maine 1772-1820 by subscription - advance pledges to purchase the published volume - but for reasons that remain uncertain, that never happened. For the first time, Barker's never before published work has been transcribed and presented in its entirety with extensive annotations, a five-chapter introduction to contextualize the work, and a glossary to make it accessible to 21st century general readers, genealogists, students, and historians. This engaging and insightful new publication allows modern readers to reimagine medicine as practiced by a rural physician in New England. We know much about how elite physicians practiced 200 years ago, but very little about the daily practice of an ordinary rural doctor, attending the ordinary rural patient. Barker's manuscript is written in a clear and engaging style, easily enjoyed by general readers as well as historians, with extensive footnotes and a glossary of terms. Barker himself intended his book to be "understood by those destitute of medical science."

Author : Kevin Siena
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300233523
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rotten Bodies written by Kevin Siena and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing look at how the memory of the plague held the poor responsible for epidemic disease in eighteenth-century Britain Britain had no idea that it would not see another plague after the horrors of 1666, and for a century and a half the fear of epidemic disease gripped and shaped British society. Plague doctors had long asserted that the bodies of the poor were especially prone to generating and spreading contagious disease, and British doctors and laypeople alike took those warnings to heart, guiding medical ideas of class throughout the eighteenth century. Dense congregations of the poor--in workhouses, hospitals, slums, courtrooms, markets, and especially prisons--were rendered sites of immense danger in the public imagination, and the fear that small outbreaks might run wild became a profound cultural force. Extensively researched, with a wide body of evidence, this book offers a fascinating look at how class was constructed physiologically and provides a new connection between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and the ravages of plague and cholera, respectively.

Author : Cynthia A. Kierner
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807179833
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rethinking American Disasters written by Cynthia A. Kierner and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2023-04-05 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking American Disasters is a pathbreaking collection of essays on hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and other calamities in the United States and British colonial America over four centuries. Proceeding from the premise that there is no such thing as a “natural” disaster, the collection invites readers to consider disasters and their aftermaths as artifacts of and vantage points onto their historical contexts.

Author : Urmi Engineer Willoughby
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807167754
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans written by Urmi Engineer Willoughby and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2017-12-13 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the innovative perspective of environment and culture, Urmi Engineer Willoughby examines yellow fever in New Orleans from 1796 to 1905. Linking local epidemics to the city’s place in the Atlantic world, Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans analyzes how incidences of and responses to the disease grew out of an environment shaped by sugar production, slavery, and urban development. Willoughby argues that transnational processes—including patterns of migration, industrialization, and imperialism—contributed to ecological changes that enabled yellow fever–carrying Aedes aëgypti mosquitoes to thrive and transmit the disease in New Orleans, challenging presumptions that yellow fever was primarily transported to the Americas on slave ships. She then traces the origin and spread of medical and popular beliefs about yellow fever immunity, from the early nineteenth-century contention that natives of New Orleans were protected, to the gradual emphasis on race as a determinant of immunity, reflecting social tensions over the abolition of slavery around the world. As the nineteenth century unfolded, ideas of biological differences between the races calcified, even as public health infrastructure expanded, and race continued to play a central role in the diagnosis and prevention of the disease. State and federal governments began to create boards and organizations responsible for preventing new outbreaks and providing care during epidemics, though medical authorities ignored evidence of black victims of yellow fever. Willoughby argues that American imperialist ambitions also contributed to yellow fever eradication and the growth of the field of tropical medicine: U.S. commercial interests in the tropical zones that grew crops like sugar cane, bananas, and coffee engendered cooperation between medical professionals and American military forces in Latin America, which in turn enabled public health campaigns to research and eliminate yellow fever in New Orleans. A signal contribution to the field of disease ecology, Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans delineates events that shaped the Crescent City’s epidemiological history, shedding light on the spread and eradication of yellow fever in the Atlantic World.

Author : Sarah E. Naramore
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1648250696
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Benjamin Rush, Civic Health, and Human Illness in the Early American Republic written by Sarah E. Naramore and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-06-20 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A close look at the medical and social theories of prominent Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush and how they influenced American medicine in the years following the Revolutionary War.

Author : Margaret C. Jacob
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691161321
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Secular Enlightenment written by Margaret C. Jacob and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. Jacob reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Jacob demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come. --Adapted from publisher description.

Author : Eric Herschthal
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300258550
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Science of Abolition written by Eric Herschthal and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing look at how antislavery scientists and Black and white abolitionists used scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders In the context of slavery, science is usually associated with slaveholders’ scientific justifications of racism. But abolitionists were equally adept at using scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders. Looking beyond the science of race, The Science of Abolition shows how Black and white scientists and abolitionists drew upon a host of scientific disciplines—from chemistry, botany, and geology, to medicine and technology—to portray slaveholders as the enemies of progress. From the 1770s through the 1860s, scientists and abolitionists in Britain and the United States argued that slavery stood in the way of scientific progress, blinded slaveholders to scientific evidence, and prevented enslavers from adopting labor-saving technologies that might eradicate enslaved labor. While historians increasingly highlight slavery’s centrality to the modern world, fueling the rise of capitalism, science, and technology, few have asked where the myth of slavery’s backwardness comes from in the first place. This book contends that by routinely portraying slaveholders as the enemies of science, abolitionists and scientists helped generate that myth.

Author : Sara Miglietti
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1317200292
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Governing the Environment in the Early Modern World written by Sara Miglietti and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the early modern period, scientific debate and governmental action became increasingly preoccupied with the environment, generating discussion across Europe and the wider world as to how to improve land and climate for human benefit. This discourse eventually promoted the reconsideration of long-held beliefs about the role of climate in upholding the social order, driving economies and affecting public health. Governing the Environment in the Early Modern World explores the relationship between cultural perceptions of the environment and practical attempts at environmental regulation and change between 1500 and 1800. Taking a cultural and intellectual approach to early modern environmental governance, this edited collection combines an interpretative perspective with new insights into a period largely unfamiliar to environmental historians. Using a rich and multifaceted narrative, this book offers an understanding as to how efforts to enhance productive aspects of the environment were both led by and contributed to new conceptualisations of the role of ‘nature’ in human society. This book offers a cultural and intellectual approach to early modern environmental history and will be of special interest to environmental, cultural and intellectual historians, as well as anyone with an interest in the culture and politics of environmental governance.

Author : Kristin Johnson
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
ISBN 13 : 0817361499
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Imagining Progress written by Kristin Johnson and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2024-07-09 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines Americans' diverging assumptions about God, Nature, and Progress at a place where the stakes were at their highest: The bedside of children during eras of high child mortality"--