'A sad inheritance of misery': the cultural life of hereditary scrofula in eighteenth-century England

This essay argues that scrofula was one of several disorders, including gout, rickets, and venereal disease, that were 'rebranded' as hereditary in response to broader cultural changes that took place during the Restoration and eighteenth century in England. While the purposes of scrofula's recategorisation were more political than medical, they resulted in this heretofore relatively obscure childhood ailment assuming a new prominence within both medical and popular discourses of the period. Scrofula became both emblem and proof of the links between sexual promiscuity, financial profligacy, and physiological degeneration, its symbolic status reinforced by the legal and moral language used to model processes of hereditary transmission. By likening the inheritance of scrofula to the inheritance of original sin-or, more commonly, to the inheritance of a 'docked entail' or damaged estate-eighteenth-century writers and artists not only made this non-inherited ailment into a sign of catastrophic hereditary decline; they also paved the way for scrofula to be identified as a disease of aristocratic vice, even though its association with crowded, unsanitary living conditions likely made it more common among the poor. By the same token, financial models of disease inheritance facilitated a bias toward paternal transmission, with scrofula often portrayed as passing, like a title or an estate, from father to son rather than from mother to daughter.

Commentary: Visual Cultures, Publication Technologies, and Legitimation in the Life Sciences

This paper comments on five articles in the special issue "Circulating Images in the Life Sciences." It sees the papers as unified by two themes. The first is their attention to the processes of legitimation. The second is the embedding of the images in textual cultures, which changed over time from the mid-nineteenth century to the very recent past, most notably with the recent advent of digital culture.

Science across the Meiji divide: Vernacular literary genres as vectors of science in modern Japan

Histories of Japanese science have been integral in affirming the Meiji Restoration of 1868 as the starting point of modern Japan. Vernacular genres, characterized as "premodern," have therefore largely been overlooked by historians of science, regardless of when they were published. Paradoxically, this has resulted in the marginalization of the very works through which most people encountered science. This article addresses this oversight and its historiographical ramifications by focusing on kyūri books - popular works of science - published in the years following the Restoration, when there was unprecedented public interest in science. It asks, what if we take these kyūri books on their own terms as science books, just as those of the time saw them? This article explores three genres of kyūri books, namely fictionalized formats, such as the epic tale (monogatari); epistolary guides; and genres, such as the sutra, that drew on religious textual practices. It argues that these literary genres provided interpretive frameworks that shaped readers' encounters with "modern" science. This exploration underscores the importance of engaging with vernacular genres to understand the emergence of science as a global category in the nineteenth century.

Tangled compositions: Botany, agency, and authorship aboard HMS Endeavour

By all accounts, James Cook's HMS Endeavour sojourn in Tahiti was a pivotal moment in Enlightenment engagements between Indigenous and European cultures. Among the voyage records that survive, the Endeavour draftsman Sydney Parkinson's Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (1773) is widely viewed as anomalous for the depth and breadth of its interests in Indigenous Tahitian culture and plant knowledge. This essay complicates that view, with emphasis on the contingencies peculiar to the Journal's publication and to Parkinson's own authorial biography. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the rhizome, I analyze Parkinson's account alongside the botanist Daniel Solander's historiographically underutilized "Plantae Otaheitenses" manuscript. In so doing, I offer an alternative reading of the Journal as archetypal rather than exceptional in its attention to Indigenous cultures and knowledges. At stake, I suggest, is an enhanced appreciation for Indigenous-European botanical engagements and for Enlightenment print culture more broadly, as well as for the nebulously adisciplinary and collaborative nature of Enlightenment natural history field practices.

'As though Miles of Ocean did not Separate us': Print and the Construction of a Transatlantic Free Love Community at the Fin de Siècle

This article argues that British and American free lovers - radical sexual reformers committed to the cause of 'sexual freedom' - came together through print to build a transatlantic community at the fin de siècle. Challenging existing narratives that characterize free love as isolated or incoherent, it argues that through print free lovers from Britain and America were able to forge links with each other, and to construct an important, coherent collective identity that transcended national boundaries. In doing so it makes two major interventions. First, it provides unique new insights into the history of free love in both the British and American contexts, placing a new focus on often overlooked transnational connections and exchanges that helped to shape late nineteenth-century free love campaigns. Second, it encourages historians to rethink the ways we look for and make sense of cohesive international reform communities more broadly in this period. By exploring how a small, radical group like the free lovers were able to cohere through processes of contestation and negotiation played out entirely in print, this article will show that, where necessary, print was enough for transatlantic reformers to construct common identities and negotiate coherent reform ideas. As such, it argues that historians of fin-de-siècle social reform should look again at the print culture of other contemporary reformers otherwise labelled divided, isolated, or marginalized to look for threads of cohesion, cooperation, and compromise.

Roy Porter Student Prize Essay Figuring Pictures and Picturing Figures: Images of the Pregnant Body and the Unborn Child in England, 1540-c.1680

Birth figures, or print images of the fetus in the uterus, were immensely popular in midwifery and surgical books in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But despite their central role in the visual culture of pregnancy and childbirth during this period, very little critical attention has been paid to them. This article seeks to address this dearth by examining birth figures in their cultural context and exploring the various ways in which they may have been used and interpreted by early modern viewers. I argue that, through this process of exploring and contextualising early modern birth figures, we can gain a richer and more nuanced understanding of the early modern body, how it was visualised, understood and treated.