Dedicated spirits: religious mediators and romantic ideas in the late nineteenth century

This article reconstructs a transatlantic community of discourse that used Romantic ideas to mediate between science and religion in order to create a framework for modern belief. The pragmatist William James, Scottish freelance intellectual Thomas Davidson, and ethical culturalist William Mackintire Salter in the United States, and the psychic researcher Frederic Myers and self‐published philosopher Shadworth Hollway Hodgson in England inherited a supreme concept of immanence from Romanticism, which they brought to their fight against dogmatism in religion and materialism in science. Emphasizing the freedom of the individual mind to believe on the basis of experience, these religious mediators oriented their new science of religions by the compass of democratic values. Their approach to modern belief contributes to the current revision of a strictly declensionist secularization by suggesting, in part, that religion among intellectuals was neither exclusively Christian in the late nineteenth century nor necessarily stifled by the impact of Darwinian evolution.     

Indicators of social change in rural Sweden in the late nineteenth century

Parish registers offer the student of history a wealth of information about the everyday lives of ordinary people in the past. Historical demographers in particular have made extensive use of these materials, and our understanding of the dynamics of local populations in pre-industrial Europe has increased greatly during the last twenty-five years. In addition to the basic demographic data on marriages, baptisms and burials, however, parish registers commonly contain other information which can shed light on social behaviour. Using the exceptionally rich Swedish records, this paper explores some ways in which material of this kind may be used to assess the extent and rate of social change in particular localities at particular times.     

The cosmos of the Paris apartment: working-class family life in the nineteenth century

Drawing on Bachelard's notion of “cosmicity” this article investigates the living conditions of Parisian working-class families in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century social critics claimed that the lack of privacy in urban apartments made decent family life impossible. However, evidence from judicial dossiers concerning attentat à la pudeur (intimate assault against children) illuminates the lived experience of children and their families in Paris apartments. Rather than a sharp divide between public and private, children experienced their apartment homes as the core of a social and spatial world under the surveillance of parents, neighbors, and other children.     

Spirometry, measurement, and race in the nineteenth century

Race correction is a common practice in contemporary pulmonary medicine that involves mathematical adjustment of lung capacity measurements in populations designated as "black" using standards derived largely from populations designated as "white." This article traces the history of the racialization and gendering of spirometry through an examination of the ideas and practices related to lung capacity measurements that circulated between Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. Lung capacity was first conceptualized as a discrete entity of potential use in the diagnosis of pulmonary disease and monitoring of the vitality of the armed forces and other public servants in spirometric studies conducted in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The spirometer was then imported to the United States and used to measure the capacity of the lungs in a large study of black and white soldiers in the Union Army sponsored by the U.S. Sanitary Commission at the end of the Civil War. Despite contrary findings and contestation by leading black intellectuals, the notion of mean differences between racial groups in the capacity of the lungs became deeply entrenched in the popular and scientific imagination in the nineteenth century, leaving unexamined both the racial categories deployed to organize data and the conditions of life that shape lung function.     

The Swiss community in Genoa from the Old Regime to the late nineteenth century

Abstract

Drawing on extensive and original archival research, this article is the first to reconstruct the origins and historical development of the Swiss community of Genoa from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. During these four centuries, the Swiss were constant and significant agents of the Genoese economy and society. The Swiss presence in the city dates back to the mid 1500s, when Swiss soldiers were the predominant component of the army of the Republic. In the 1700s the Swiss community broadened its economic scope and varied its social configuration. It consisted of both a well-established Protestant, élite of merchant-bankers and textile entrepreneurs and a lower layer of craftsmen, confectioners, street vendors and servants. By the end of the 1700s the Swiss élite was such a thriving and well-integrated group that in 1799 Genoa was selected to be the seat of the first Swiss consulate of the Italian peninsula, the second in Europe after Bordeaux (1798). From the Restoration (1815) to Italian Unification (1861), the Swiss merchant-bankers and textile industrialists continued to be active promoters of the city's economic and trading system. In the decades after Unification (1861–80s), Swiss capital investments moved into new economic sectors (steam-shipping and maritime insurance) that contributed to the modernization of the Genoese and Italian merchant fleet. During the nineteenth century the Swiss community created its own social spaces and identity within the city – a church, a cemetery, a school, and a charitable foundation. As in many other northern Italian cities, the consolidation of the community's external image did not weaken the Swiss élite's integration with the local Genoese upper class.     

Wilderness and health in the nineteenth century

During the latter part of the nineteenth century a form of medical treatment often called a “wilderness cure” enjoyed considerable popularity in the United States, especially in California. This procedure involved little more than an open-air sojourn in wild country, usually wooded uplands. It was based on the belief that wild, timbered uplands exerted curative influences on sick persons, especially consumptives. The cure's effectiveness was supposed to derive from influences of climate, vegetation, and style of living as well as spiritual influences related to aesthetics. Wilderness therapy fell into desuetude in the twentieth century as the realization spread that the wilderness environment was of little value in combating microbial and other agents of disease. In its heyday, however, the wilderness treatment attracted much support and was undertaken by a great many invalids. It seems highly likely that the perception of the wilderness as a source of health softened pre-existing negative attitudes to wild landscapes in America.     

Rethinking the history of female circumcision and clitoridectomy: American medicine and female sexuality in the late nineteenth century

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was one kind of female orgasm and it was clitoral; there was also only one kind of healthy sexual instinct for a woman and it was for penetrative sex with her husband. When a woman behaved outside of this normality-by masturbating or by not responding to her husband's affections-her sexual instinct was seen as disordered. If healthy women, then, were believed only to be sexual within the marital embrace, what better way to explain these errant behaviors than by blaming the clitoris, an organ seen as key to female sexual instinct? Doctors corrected a clitoris in an unhealthy state using one of four surgeries-removing smegma or adhesions between the clitoris and its hood, removing the hood (circumcision), or removing the clitoris (clitoridectomy)-in order to correct a woman's sexual instinct in an unhealthy state. Their approach to clitoral surgery, at least as revealed in published medical works, was a cautious one that respected the importance of clitoral stimulation for healthy sexuality while simultaneously recognizing its role as cause and symptom in cases of insanity that were tied to masturbation.     

Brain physiology and the mind in the nineteenth century

This article explores the integration of research and theory in nineteenth-century neurophysiology. Four generalities combine to explain their integration. They are the core beliefs of the neurologists, the pervasive habit of perceiving mind when observing behavior, the criteria for the existence of mind, and mind as an efficient cause. These generalities help explain specific choices made by certain researchers to work within the traditional model of the nervous system, to reject materialism, and to find intelligence and voluntary behaviors in physiological systems.