Catherine Kelly

Public Rewards and Innovation Policy: Lessons from the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

There has been renewed interest in recent years in using prizes and rewards to promote innovation. History has played a central role in public debates in the UK about the merits of such interventions, with the Longitude Prize 2014 being self‐consciously modelled on its eighteenth century precursor. Similarly, historical case studies have been used extensively in the scholarly literature in this area. However, it is striking that there has been little engagement with parliaments role generally in rewarding inventors in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and how this formed part of a broader system of rewards. The article explores how this system operated and demonstrates that it formed an established part of the legal landscape for many decades. It considers the extent to which a more complete understanding of the historical use of prizes and rewards during the key period of Britains industrialisation might inform current debates.

Not From the College, but Through the Public and the Legislature: Charles Maclean and the Relocation of Medical Debate in the Early Nineteenth Century

Charles Maclean is generally thought to have played an important role in the contagion debates of the early nineteenth century and to have prompted two parliamentary inquiries into the issue. The author examines the effects of Maclean’s efforts to relocate the contagion debates from the medical to the public sphere. The author shows that Maclean’s tactics challenged the exclusivity of medical knowledge by ceding power to decide the debate to a non–medically expert Parliament. The author also demonstrates how this conflict laid bare the side-by-side existence of two probative systems in medical debates during the early nineteenth century by examining the medical profession’s struggle to establish what type of evidence would be considered probative and what type of witness would be considered competent to give it.

Histories of medical lobbying

The lobbying of government ministers by medical professionals is a live issue. Health professionals around the world have been active in the pursuit of legislative change. In the UK, the AllTrials campaign continues to exert pressure on parliamentarians to force greater transparency in the publication of clinical trial results. This year doctors in Australia refused to discharge child refugees from hospital into detention centres deemed harmful to their health. The lobbying of medical humanitarians such as Medecins sans Frontieres in France effected a change in the law there, in 1998, that allowed undocumented immigrants with life-threatening conditions to remain in the country for medical treatment.

Parliamentary rewards and the evolution of the patent system

This article examines the impact on the patent system of rewards for innovation across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this period Parliament would regularly grant rewards to inventors, with many of these rewards being set out in legislation. This legislation provided Parliament with the opportunity to promote a model of state support for inventors; a model that made public disclosure of the invention a precondition for assistance from the State. This had important implications for patent law, in particular, in helping to develop the role of the patent specification and the doctrine of sufficiency of disclosure. In this way the reward system helped establish the framework under which the State would provide support for inventors. Simultaneously, however, the reward system created a space in which inventors would have to do more than meet the minimum requirement of public disclosure. Rewards allowed the State to distinguish between different classes of inventor and to make special provision for particularly worthy individuals. In this way the reward system recognised the contribution of the ‘heroic inventor’, whilst leaving the core of the patent system undisturbed.

Book Reviews: Ship’s Surgeons of the Dutch East India Company: Commerce and the Progress of Medicine in the Eighteenth Century

In Ship’s Surgeons of the Dutch East India Company: Commerce and the Progress of Medicine in the Eighteenth Century, Iris Bruijn successfully condenses a vast amount of detailed research into an accessible and interesting account of her subjects. It is Bruijn’s stated aim to rescue these employees of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) from what she terms a prevailing historical ‘black legend’ that labels the ship’s surgeon a ‘mere village barber, a good-for-nothing and an illiterate’. In this, Bruijn possibly overlooks a significant volume of recent research that has gone a good way to demonstrating the fallacy of that image, certainly for the nineteenth century. However, the eighteenth century has received significantly less attention from other historians. The data she has collected for the VOC is impressive and significant in its own right, but also provides a very important source of comparison with other European seafaring nations, widening our understanding of the overall picture of medicine at sea during this period.