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The Correspondence of James Jurin (1684-1750)
James Jurin (1684-1750) occupied a central place in the medical and scientific circles of Augustan and Georgian England. His dispassionate yet forceful advocacy of smallpox inoculation using an innovative statistical approach brought him widespread recognition both in Britain and abroad. He was Secretary to the Royal Society for seven years and participated vigorously in the most important scientific debates of the period. Jurin's correspondence, recently made available to the public, provides rich material for the study of eighteenth-century natural philosophy and medicine, especially of the smallpox inoculation debates. This volume reproduces a broad and valuable selection of letters, as well as a list of Jurin's publications and a calendar of the complete correspondence. The introductory biographical essay describes how Jurin combined a career as a successful London physician with that of a natural philosopher.
Gainsborough's Vision
Thomas Gainsborough, one of the most popular British painters, has been celebrated as a landscapist, a portrait painter, and a man of feeling whose impetuous character is revealed in his art, life and letters. This book reveals that the style, themes and ideas of Gainsborough’s paintings constitute purposeful expressions of an intellectual and visual culture whose importance in the development of eighteenth-century British art has gone unrecognized. "Amal Asfour and Paul Williamson have set out to make us look more knowledgeably at the paintings of Gainsborough... their treatment is richly informative."—George Steiner, The Observer "Asfour and Williamson display a profound knowledge of 18th-century aesthetics... a highly stimulating book."—The British Art Journal
David Hartley on Human Nature
Presents the first complete account of the thought of David Hartley, one of the most original minds of the eighteenth century.
Nervous Conditions
Nervous Conditions explores the role of the body in the development of modern science, challenging the myth that modern science is built on a bedrock of objectivity and confident empiricism. In this fascinating look into the private world of British natural philosophers—including John Dalton, Lord Kelvin, Charles Babbage, John Herschel, and many others—Elizabeth Green Musselman shows how the internal workings of their bodies played an important part in the sciences' movement to the center of modern life, and how a scientific community and a nation struggled their way into existence. Many of these natural philosophers endured serious nervous difficulties, particularly vision problems. They turned these weaknesses into strengths, however, by claiming that their well-disciplined mental skills enabled them to transcend their bodily frailties. Their adeptness at transcendence, they asserted, explained why men of science belonged at the heart of modern life, and qualified them to address such problems as unifying the British provinces into one nation, managing the industrial workplace, and accommodating religious plurality.
Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) was a polymath of dazzling intellectual range and energy. Renowned for his co-discovery of the second law of thermodynamics and his invention of the ophthalmoscope, Helmholtz also made many other contributions to physiology, physical theory, philosophy of science and mathematics, and aesthetic thought. During the late nineteenth century, Helmholtz was revered as a scientist-sage—much like Albert Einstein in this century. David Cahan has assembled an outstanding group of European and North American historians of science and philosophy for this intellectual biography of Helmholtz, the first ever to critically assess both his published and unpublished writings. It represents a significant contribution not only to Helmholtz scholarship but also to the history of nineteenth-century science and philosophy in general.
