RESUMEN
The sonic diagnostic techniques of percussion and mediate auscultation advocated by Leopold von Auenbrugger and R. T. H. Laennec developed within larger musical contexts of practice, notation, and epistemology. Earlier, François-Nicolas Marquet proposed a musical notation of pulse that connected felt pulsation with heard music. Though contemporary vitalists rejected Marquet's work, mechanists such as Albrecht von Haller included it into the larger discourse about the physiological manifestations of bodily fluids and fibers. Educated in that mechanistic physiology, Auenbrugger used musical vocabulary to present his work on thoracic percussion; Laennec's musical experience shaped his exploration of the new timbres involved in mediate auscultation.
Asunto(s)
Auscultación/historia , Auscultación/métodos , Técnicas y Procedimientos Diagnósticos/historia , Música/historia , Percusión/historia , Percusión/métodos , Historia del Siglo XIX , Historia del Siglo XX , Historia del Siglo XXI , HumanosRESUMEN
In our era, the idea of a stimulant is synonymous with its biochemical properties. A stimulant, we think, is a substance that enhances the activity of the central and peripheral nervous systems. But in the eighteenth century, a new family of theories about the workings of stimulants took shape, based on exciting but erroneous assumptions. Proponents of these theories thought that many more diseases were "nervous" in origin than had previously been supposed. They hoped that the workings of the "nervous power" could be aided by the judicious use of stimulants and narcotics. Practitioners working within this broad "neuropathological" paradigm equated the workings of stimulation with those of gravity. Stimulation, they believed, was a kind of master principle in nature. Some hoped it would help refound medicine on Newtonian, mathematical lines. For patients, the most visible legacy of the neuropathological revolution was the abandonment of bloodletting or "cupping" and the increasingly widespread use of opium and alcohol in medical treatments. In this chapter, I explore the career of one of the most famous writers of the Romantic era, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) who had the misfortune to live through this therapeutic revolution. I describe the circumstances under which he came to take opiates and the development of his opinions about their effect on him.
Asunto(s)
Opio/historia , Historia del Siglo XVII , Historia del Siglo XVIII , Historia del Siglo XIX , HumanosRESUMEN
Between 1763 and 1798 at least 30 young men from the territory of today's Switzerland attended the École Vétérinaire in Lyon. Various archives provide information about their achievements at the school and their later lives. Several biographies exist. The Bernese Albrecht von Haller was particularly devoted to the idea of sending Swiss students to Lyon. He therefore contacted and corresponded with Claude Bourgelat, the founder of the École Vétérinaire in Lyon. Both Albrecht von Haller and Claude Bourgelat engaged in fighting dangerous epizootic diseases such as Contagious Pleuropneumonia or Rinderpest. They both demanded that all sick animals and animals which had contact with the sick ones should be killed.
Asunto(s)
Facultades de Medicina Veterinaria/historia , Veterinarios/historia , Medicina Veterinaria/historia , Enfermedades de los Animales/prevención & control , Animales , Epidemias/prevención & control , Epidemias/veterinaria , Historia del Siglo XVIII , Humanos , SuizaRESUMEN
In her self-portrait in wax, eighteenth-century Bolognese anatomist and anatomical modeler Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714-1774) represented herself in sumptuous aristocratic dress while dissecting a human brain. This essay explores the scientific and symbolic meaning of the vivid self-portrayal in terms of Anna Morandi's lifework at the intersection of art and anatomical science and within the remarkable cultural context of Enlightenment Bologna that fostered her rise to international acclaim.