Surgeon to the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

IN this paper I want to examine in some detail one eighteenth-century attempt to restructure the foundations of mechanics, that of Leonhard Euler. It is now generally recognized that the idea, due to Mach, that all that happened in the eighteenth century was the elaboration of a deductive and mathematical mechanics on the basis of Newton's laws is misleading at best. Newton's Principia needed m...

Smallpox was probably the single most lethal disease in eighteenth-century Britain but was reduced to a minor cause of death by the mid-nineteenth century due to vaccination programmes post-1798.While the success of vaccination is unquestionable, it remains disputed to what extent the prophylactic precursor of vaccination, inoculation, reduced smallpox mortality in the eighteenth century. Small...

Introduction Today it is generally the case that urban dwellers enjoy higher life expectancy than their rural counterparts, globally. This urban advantage is partly attributable to the higher average incomes of urban dwellers, as well as superior access to public health services, including water supply and sewage disposal, and medical services. However this was not the historical norm. In the s...

As a result of a genuine explosion in historiographical studies on the subject over the last two decades, the various European nobilities can now be considered to have been studied in some depth. A general tendency to be noted in the above-mentioned works relates to the idea highlighted by various researchers seeking to attenuate the early modernisation of noble values, who have taken the Frenc...

How can we understand, on a theoretical level, the presence of music in French novels eighteenth-century? This article examines this question light prevailing theories and prose fiction. By identifying major discrepancies between two, aim is to provide different basis for our understanding eighteenth-century narrative.

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...

In the mid eighteenth century, Enlightenment debates about women's social role prompted a flurry of discussions about motherhood. Advice manuals, images of mothers, and women's personal writings highlighted breastfeeding as one of the most important maternal duties. This thesis argues that by the end of the eighteenth century advice manuals developed a new focus on the emotional and physical pl...

DENYS HAY, Annalists and historians. Western historiography from the eighth to the eighteenth century, London, Methuen, 1977, 8vo, pp. viii, 215, £2.95 (paperback). For very nearly forty years the distinguished Professor of Medieval History in the University of Edinburgh has planned to write a history of European historiography. He now does so with a brilliant survey, ranging from the historian...