Mid-Eighteenth Century Conversation

Benjamin Franklin's Wife's Apoplexy and Mid-Eighteenth Century Medicine.

On 16 April 1768, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), then 62 and in England, wrote a letter to his stay-at-home wife, Deborah (Franklin, née Read; 1708–74; Figure 1).1 “Amidst all the sickness and misfortunes of our friends,” he began, “what reason have you and I to bless God, that we at these years enjoy with our children so great a Share of health and so much happiness in other respects.” Franklin ...

Paupers and the infirmary in mid-eighteenth-century Shrewsbury.

or injured paupers has often been noted. Yet in the mid-eighteenth century, provincial hospitals emerged as an option to complement the efforts of parish officers in some places. Mary Fissell's work on the Bristol Infirmary has established the similarity of circumstances which pushed people on to poor relief or into an infirmary, but it has not yet been determined whether there was a substantia...

Eighteenth-Century Europe

Chapter 6: Varieties of the Public Sphere To this point, we have encountered changes, as well as continuity, in European politics, economics, society, and thought. Each of these developments contributed to a transformation that some consider the most fundamental transformation of the century -the emergence, between the state sector and private economic sphere, of autonomous institutions of civi...

Eighteenth-Century Europe

Literature of the Eighteenth Century

Eighteenth century in England was an age equal to the age of Augustus Caesar, when the Roman society had reached the peak of its glory. The name Augustan Age was chosen by writers who saw in Pope, Addison, Swift, Johnson and Burke the modern parallels to Horace, Virgil and Cicero, and all that brilliant company who made Roman literature famous in the day of Augustus. Past ages of England were l...