too. For example, much of the background material on issues like legislation will be thoroughly known to social historians of eighteenth-century medicine. The chapter on Earl Ferrers' and Nicholson's trials is principally narrative and does little to advance our understanding of the development of the insanity defence in the eighteenth century. At one level it is curiously old-fashioned, even i...

The article analyzes a 1790 manuscript copy of Materia medica misionera, a book written in 1710 by a Jesuit, Pedro Montenegro. Alongside knowledge of a magical or religious nature, and exotic ingredients for the recipes, this work also contains the unmistakable presence of Hippocratic and Galenic conceptions and a growing empiricism, characteristic of the scientific transformations seen in the ...

This examination of academic works produced by eighteenth-century natural philosophers discusses some recurring ideas about the Chain of Being. To this end, the article analyzes the relations between natural philosophy and theology during the period. It also re-evaluates some elements of the Chain of Being through an exploration of authors who addressed the topic in their writings. Lastly, it i...

Ergotism, the disease caused by consuming Claviceps purpurea, a highly poisonous, grain-infecting fungus, occurred at various places scattered throughout Norway during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By focusing on these cases we chart the changing interpretations of the peculiar disease, frequently understood within a religious context or considered as a supernatural (e.g. ghostly) ex...

In an effort to enhance the odds of " organized spontaneity " the paper advances analytics for selection of participants, format of interaction, and milieu within which the interaction occurs. The analysis proceeds in a two-part process. First, three creative environments far removed from the present day academic forums – eighteenth-century French salons, the eighteenth-century London coffeehou...

When one looks at the history of the medical profession in eighteenth-century England, the striking feature is the extent to which historians have concentrated on the minority of famous and distinguished medical men, mostly in London, and how little is known of the much more numerous rank-and-file practitioners of provincial England. This paper is part of a study that attempts to redress the ba...

This fine volume of essays on the nobility in the later eighteenth century is a most welcome addition to the existing literature. It comprises eleven essays by American historians whose research engages with the concept of nobility. The collection issues from a conference in 2004 and reflects the cultural turn in historiography that has such sway, particularly in America. There is a stimulating...

Michael MacDonald's piece on the social history of suicide-represent summaries of an author's previous, more detailed scholarship. A number provide preliminary offerings of new ideas and information, which the reader imagines will go on to appear with elaboration in larger scholarly form. Examples of this last category are Ian Dowbiggin's brief study of theories of paranoia in French mental med...

lunatic asylums, the tentative steps towards non-asylum psychiatric practice in the first half of the twentieth century, and the subsequent adoption of a policy euphemistically called "6community care". Busfield has read quite widely in the recent secondary literature, and draws upon a diverse range of scholarship (MacDonald, Parry-Jones, Kathleen Jones, Hunter and Macalpine, Aubrey Lewis, Scul...

The proper study of mankind is man.' In its early years angina pectoris was for the most part an affliction of middle-aged and elderly men, almost exclusively a complaint of the affluent and a "British disease".2 It was first reported in 1768 and became prevalent by the 1770s, a time when the population of England was growing rapidly and its expectation of life lengthening. It is therefore pert...