Der Weg zur Entdeckung des pulmonalen Gasaustausches

ZusammenfassungMit der Entdeckung des Sauerstoffs und des pulmonalen Gasaustausches ist ein großer Schritt im Verständnis der Atmung vollzogen worden. Über Jahrhunderte hinweg wurde die Auffassung vertreten, dass die Lunge primär zur Kühlung des Herzens bzw. zur „Vervollkommnung“ des Blutes notwendig sei. Die Beobachtung einer unterschiedlichen Blutfarbe vor und nach Lungenpassage führte Richard Lower (1631–1691) zu der Annahme, dass dem Blut durch die Atmung ein spezieller Stoff zugeführt worden sein müsse. Georg Ernst Stahl (1660–1734) formulierte mit seiner Phlogistontheorie einen Feuerstoff „Phlogiston“ (phlox = Flamme), der in allen brennbaren Stoffen enthalten sei und bei der Verbrennung entweiche. John Mayow (1641–1679) erkannte, dass etwa ein Fünftel des Atemgases bedeutsam für den Atmungsprozess ist, er nannte das Gas „spiritus nitro aerius“. Erstmalig wurde Sauerstoff von dem schwedisch-deutschen Apotheker Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742–1786) sowie dem englischen Chemiker Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) in den 1770er-Jahren – unabhängig voneinander – hergestellt. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) hat den Elementcharakter des Sauerstoffs erkannt und den Oxidationsvorgang erstmals exakt beschrieben.

‘Till all my sense is lost in infinite’

This chapter traces Anna Letitia Barbauld’s long-standing project to reassert an emotional aspect to Rational Dissenting prayer, which threatened to slip into sterilely intellectual contemplation. However, evoking various affective legacies relevant to Dissenting sensibility—from Isaac Watts to Edward Young—creates poems that struggle to reconcile the competing pulls of reason and passion. Whilst a scene she inherits from the thought of the Unitarian theologian Joseph Priestley—the solitary intellect meditating silently on the sublimity of the divine—overhangs her work, she moves increasingly beyond it. She experiments with greater degrees of affect in both verse and prose hymns, and the chapter concludes by examining a final Barbauldian understanding of the emotions of prayer as intrinsically social and intersubjective.

Joseph Priestley (1733 - 1804)

Portrait of the Unitarian minister and scientist, Joseph Priestley

Dumouriez dining in state at St James's

Charles Dumouriez, one of France’s most successful military commanders, turned on the revolutionary government in March 1793, but was soon forced to flee to Britain, where he would remain until his death in 1823. Gillray shows him being offered the decapitated head of the Prime Minister, William Pitt, by Charles James Fox, leader of the opposition Whigs; a crown, by Fox’s Whig colleague Richard Brinsley Sheridan; while to the extreme left the dissenting minister Joseph Priestley offers Dumouriez a bishop’s mitre. The dishes are decorated with frogs.

Mid-Atlantic

The chapter “Mid-Atlantic” discusses scientific and technological sites of adult interest in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC, including the Johnson Victrola Museum, National Cryptologic Museum, the Sarnoff Collection, New York Botanical Garden, Joseph Priestley House, and Smithsonian Institution. The traveler is provided with essential information, including addresses, telephone numbers, hours of entry, handicapped access, dining facilities, dates open and closed, available public transportation, and websites. Nearly every site included here has been visited by the authors. Although written with scientists in mind, this book is for anyone who likes to travel and visit places of historical and scientific interest. Included are photographs of many sites within each state.

Pietro Giannone and the Nonjuring Contribution to the Separation of Church and State

Why did the English Nonjuror Richard Rawlinson promote the 1729–30 English translation of Pietro Giannone's Civil History of Naples? The Nonjurors in England espoused ecclesiastical independency from the state, which they derived from the thought of Restoration High Churchmen and from the French Gallican Louis Ellies Du Pin. Giannone, a Neapolitan lawyer, proposed a similar “two powers” model of strict autonomy for both church and state. Giannone's concept was later rejected by enlightened writers like Viscount Bolingbroke and Edward Gibbon, who associated it with high church prejudices. It was defended by the Dissenter Joseph Priestley, who combined it with his own theory of religious sociability. The impact of Giannone on the Nonjurors and on Priestley illuminates the complex religious background to what is often seen as a fundamentally secular doctrine: the separation of church and state.