Michel Blavet's Breathing Marks: A Rare Source for Musical Phrasing in Eighteenth-Century France

Gestation of the clinic.

MICHEL FOUCAULT'S Naissance de la clinique (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1963) makes a brilliant case for the sudden emergence in the late eighteenth century of the hospital clinic as the central concept and institution of Western medicine. Foucault's thesis, briefly stated, sees the birth of the clinic as an "essential mutation in medical knowledge" arising out of a general epistem...

The trade in medicinal leeches in the southern Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century.

The practice of bloodletting or phlebotomy was a predominant feature of western medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the use of medicinal leeches as a mild form of letting blood achieved immense notoriety in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, especially in France. The almost insatiable demand for leeches drove a lucrative trade in these animals, the history of whi...

In the Age of the Web: Strategies for Building a Collection of Primary Sources for European History from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century

CHANCESI N TECHNOLOGY and evolving trends in contemporary scholarship are enhancing the role of the research library as the principal custodian of the written and printed artifacts that serve as primary sources for studying the literature and history of western Europe from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. In order to respond to an increasing desire of scholars to examine original sour...

Hysteria at the Edinburgh Infirmary: the construction and treatment of a disease, 1770-1800.

I In the introduction to his History of sexuality, Michel Foucault pointed to the eighteenth century as the period in which sexuality became a medical concern and women were, in his words, subjected to "hysterization".' By this term, Foucault probably meant that medicine began to pay greater attention to female bodily functions, trying to explain anew women's behaviour and physical complaints w...

Enlightened Secrets: Silk, Intelligent Travel, and Industrial Espionage in Eighteenth-Century France