Laurence Brockliss

The medical world of early modern France

The Medical World of Early Modern France recounts the history of medicine in France between the sixteenth century and the French Revolution. Physicians, surgeons and apothecaries are centre-stage, and the study provides an overview of long-term changes in their ideas about medicine and their craft. Other denizens of the medical world - quacks, charlatans, wise women, midwives, herbalist and others - are also brought into the analysis, which is set within the broader context of social, economic, demographic and cultural change. The breadth of the chronological and analytical framework, and the depth of the archival research behind it, makes this a unique account of the evolution of medical ideas and practices in one of the major countries of early modern Europe.

French higher education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries : a cultural history

This study uses evidence from surviving student cahiers and professional textbooks to recreate the educational experience of the French professional classes in the age of absolutism.

Advancing with the Army: Medicine, the Professions, and Social Mobility in the British Isles 1790-1850

Introduction: The French Wars, Industrialisation and the Professions 1. Army medical service 2. Background 3. Education 4. Army Careers 5. Professional Life Outside the Service 6. Fortunes and Families 7. Enquiring Minds 8. Reflection

Quelle révolution scientifique? Les sciences de la vie dans la querelle des anciens et des modernes (XVIe et XVIIIe siècles) par Pascal Duris (review)

The late-seventeenth-century quarrel between the ancients and the moderns was as much about the relative virtues of the old and new science as about classical and seventeenthcentury literature. Moreover, as Pascal Duris sets out to show, the quarrel, where it touched the life sciences in particular, was part of a much longer argument and one in which the ancients had the best lines. The author identifies two distinct periods to the debate. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, philosophers were very conscious of their debt to the ancients. A few, like Bacon and Harvey, believed it would be possible to go further than the ancients because they were standing on the shoulders of giants; others, feeling the world was ageing fast and the ancients were bigger in every way including size, suspected there was little the moderns could add; while sceptics, such as Agrippa or Montaigne, felt the ancients were an anchor in a world where nothing could be known for certain. From the mid-seventeenth century, in contrast, a small but growing number of natural philosophers, led in France by Descartes, Malebranche, and Fontenelle, affected contempt for the ancients and maintained that new discoveries, like the circulation of the blood, meant that the science of nature had to be remade. The supporters of the ancients, however, fought back — and more than held their own. They did not reject the discoveries of their contemporaries out of hand, but embraced them, insisting that they had either been anticipated by the ancients or would have been, had the ancients had access to the telescope and the microscope. The quarrel between the ancients and moderns in the sciences therefore became a quarrel between the Baconians and the Cartesians. In the life sciences, where there were many ways of interpreting similar experiences — as was shown by Redi and his opponents over the reality of spontaneous generation —, the Cartesians would always be objects of suspicion. If the eighteenth century was the age of Linnaeus, it was also the age of Buffon, who had no time for the former’s attempt to establish a completely new form of classification and who opened his Histoire naturelle in 1749 by honouring the ancients. This is a very readable book which offers an interesting approach to the history of seventeenth-century science. Many of the texts discussed are little known, and even the more familiar are discussed in a novel way. The only caveat that might be raised is with the conclusion the author draws from the study. In his view, it was the work of the life scientists, not the physical scientists, that captivated the seventeenth-century imagination. Given the dominance of the Baconians in this field, it is thus no longer useful to speak of a Scientific Revolution, for the concept would have meant nothing to contemporaries. This seems a huge leap, and in the case of England ignores the broad and deep literary interest in astronomy and the physical sciences, charted over fifty years ago by Marjorie Hope Nicolson in Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s ‘Opticks’ and the 18th Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946).

Book Review: Physician to the Fleet: The Life and Times of Thomas Trotter, 1760–1832

Of all the surgeons who served with the Royal Navy in the long eighteenth century, none is better known to medical historians than Thomas Trotter, who played a major part in the defeat of scurvy in the 1790s. Yet this is the first proper biography. The two authors pay due attention to Trotter’s career outside the Navy – the year he spent on the notorious slave ship, the Brookes, in 1783–4 and his long after-life as a physician in private practice in Newcastle. However the meat of the book, as is understandable, deals with his service in the Navy as surgeon’s mate on the Berwick, and other vessels during the War of American Independence, then in the years 1789–1802 as surgeon afloat, assistant physician at Haslar, and for eight years physician to the Channel Fleet, where he chose to be based on the hospital ship Charon rather than with the admiral, until forced on shore by injury. Trotter in the 1790s is depicted as an energetic, determined but cantankerous reformer, anxious to tackle all manner of naval scourges, including drunkenness, through hygiene and regulation as much as the discovery of effective therapies. His specific role in the introduction of citrus fruits to combat scurvy is carefully reconstructed from the missives that he fired off to the Admiralty and honestly assessed. Trotter’s importance, the authors conclude, should not be exaggerated. He was pushing at an open door in that a number of serving officers, if not the naval medical establishment, were already convinced of the efficacy of limes and lemons. Moreover, Trotter, unlike his allies amongst the naval commanders, never championed the use of citrus fruits as a prophylactic, only as a cure. This is a well-written and well-paced book that is essential reading for any historian of Nelson’s Navy. Some of the scene setting – such as the account at the beginning of the book of the intellectual life of Edinburgh at the time Trotter studied there – suggests limited acquaintance with the secondary literature, but this does not detract from the book’s overall impact. If the book has limitations as a biography, it is that Trotter as a private man lies largely hidden from view.What we chiefly learn about are the ideas he chose to place in print: his early medical works; his three-volume Medicina nautica(1797–1803), built around his surgeon’s logs; his works on drunkenness (1804–5); his 1807 study of nervous diseases; his play, The Noble Foundling, performed at Newcastle in 1813; and his poetry (published at the end of his life with the wonderful title of Sea Weeds). This is an impressive publication list for a busy professional man, and the authors demonstrate that his collected works repay close reading: his study of alcoholism was pioneering. But beyond a picture of a man who was appalled by his experience on the Brookes (as evidenced by his testimony before a select committee of the House of Commons in 1790) and quick to take offence with superiors as well as colleagues, the book offers no insights into what made Trotter tick. This is not the authors’ fault: Trotter left no diary or private letters, and the information about his naval career contained in the Admiralty series of the National Archive primarily reveals his public face. The present reviewer found a similar problem in co-writing the life of Nelson’s surgeon, William Beatty, for the Trafalgar bicentenary, and Beatty only left one publication. It remains unclear, therefore, how exceptional Trotter’s experiences in and out of the Senior Service, as an author, reformer and doctor, actually were. This will hopefully become a little clearer when this reviewer and his colleagues, Professor Moss and Dr Cardwell, finally complete their ongoing prosopographical study of naval surgeons during theFrench Wars.

Educational Philosophy in the French Enlightenment: From Nature to Second Nature

decades a majority of historians have been famously loath to concede that ideas played a formatively crucial part in the Revolution’. Israel’s aim is to reinstate ideas as the prime motivators of Revolutionary action – something that, as he rightly points out, the Revolutionaries themselves believed. Among a ‘vast corpus’ of ‘absurdly inadequate’ historiography, he cites in particular François Furet. Yet Israel overstates the extent to which he is swimming against the tide. There is, in the first place, a considerable amount of purely intellectual scholarship – on the part of Michael Sonenscher, for example. Second, much respectable historiography of the Revolution now seeks to weave the analysis of ideas into the overall fabric. Who could argue that even a mainstream work such as Simon Schama’s Citizens, still perhaps the best-known treatment of the period, is bereft of intellectual engagement, for all its novelistic impetus? Perhaps the most recommendable recent account of eighteenth-century France, Colin Jones’s The Great Nation, explicitly sets out to achieve this synthesis, setting the traffic in ideas and information alongside the broadening of other, economic networks. In this context, Israel’s tendency to examine ideas in isolation looks like a retrograde step. Ultimately, it is tempting to ask what this volume is for. Its price and brevity equip it for a spot on undergraduate reading lists, but students seeking an introduction to the Enlightenment, or being fooled by the Jacques-Louis David cover into expecting a Revolutionary history, will be disappointed by its tendentiousness and, worse, by its assumption of extensive prior knowledge. Obscure names flash by with barely an introduction; in his conclusion, for example, Israel refers parenthetically to ‘men such as Bergier, Richard, Jamin, Marin, Hayer, Gauchat, Griffet, Chaudon, Nonnotte, Crillon, Deschamps, and Feller’. And Spinoza, whose role in the trilogy was anchored by extensive exploration of the Dutch milieu in Radical Enlightenment, is here a more ghostly presence, popping up now and again (including in the closing paragraphs) in a manner that many may find puzzling. The academic reader, meanwhile, will tackle A Revolution of the Mind with Israel’s trilogy at her elbow, pursuing its loose ends to their conclusions in the original works, and passing over its frequent generalisations in the assurance that the professor has more than done his homework. If it encourages a wholehearted re-examination of the trilogy – a body of work whose impact has yet fully to be appreciated by scholars – it will not be wasted effort. At the very least, a guidebook should stimulate readers to discover for themselves the wonderful places it describes.

Women and the shaping of the nation’s young: education and public doctrine in Britain 1750–1850

While Weaver-Hightower’s pro-feminist perspective informs the book, he rejects a homogenous and totalising view of the ‘boy turn’ as simply a backlash to feminism. He argues that there was genuine concern about academic and social issues faced by boys. Similarly, he identifies positive aspects of BGIR in focusing attention on pedagogy, curriculum and assessment, and in the attention brought to destructive social issues for boys. However, the range of popular-rhetorical texts, such as those of Gurian, Pollack and Biddulph, appeal precisely because they offer practitioners and parents a ‘how-to’ guide for boys. That practitioners are left to rely on these popular gurus is arguably a strategic mistake of the pro-feminist resistance which did not appear to engage with the ‘gritty materialities of boys’ issues’ (p. 91). Overall, Weaver-Hightower assesses BGIR as a victory of recuperative masculinities. Apart from the economy that developed around boys’ programmes and products, BGIR authorised a conservative, hegemonic version of masculinity. This is despite the fact that the recast Gender Equity Framework has yet to be implemented; attempts at modifying the 1984 Sex Discrimination Act to allow for male-only teaching scholarships failed; and the final Stage 2 BELS report has criticised the uncritical adoption by schools of populist messages about boys. The author warns against a benign view of a policy that ignores the interplay of masculinity and racism, class and heterosexism; that retreats from social justice; and abandons focus, research on or finance for girls’ education. The trends favourable to the growth of boys’ education exist at least in the USA if not elsewhere, and include the impact of neoliberalism, the globalised impact of the popular-rhetorical texts, and the ‘gap talk’ of standardised testing and accountability. Yet the focus on boys’ issues has also produced progressive possibilities and made it evident that boys, too, are gendered beings.

Enlightenment Contested. Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752

Jonathan Israel, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), xxiv + 983 pp., £30.00/

A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c. 1750-c. 1850

75.00 (hb), ISBN 978‐0‐19‐927922‐7 In an earlier book which was published in 2001, Jonathan Israel presented a nove...