Morbi Artificum

This study presents the first full translation from Latin to English of the Linnaean dissertation Morbi Artificum or Occupational diseases, submitted by Nicholas Skragge in 1765. It consists of an essay that places the dissertation in historical and scientific context and of the translation. Skragge’s thesis has not only significance in the history of occupational medicine but also provides a perspective on Linnaeus’ thinking on dietetics. Skragge’s doctoral thesis is one of the 186 academic dissertations defended by students of Carl Linnaeus. Prior to the present study, only three of these 186 dissertations have been translated from Latin to English in our own times. The first extensive compendium on occupational diseases by Bernardino Ramazzini, with the title De Morbis Artificum Diatriba, served as a blueprint for Skragge’s thesis. The background for Skragge’s thesis was Linnaeus’ general interest in systematizing objects according to certain norms in biology, which methodology he also applied when classifying diseases in medicine. Also, Linnaeus’ life-long emphasis on the importance of dietetics is evident in the thesis. Finally, in the era when Linnaeus lived (Age of Liberty), Sweden focused greatly on improving the country’s economy. Since trade and industry were prioritized by the state, it was reasonable to map the diseases workers were prone to.

“The bourgeois nature in difficulties”: The Crisis of Liberalism in Robert Browning's Aristophanes’ Apology

Nathan K. Hensley's recent study, Forms of Empire (2016), posits that liberalism, as the nineteenth century progressed, came up against the “wayward meanings” generated by its own contradictions, particularly the “curious intimacy between legality and harm” that characterized a doctrine of individual freedom inextricably rooted in violent imperial expansion. For Hensley, “the dogged persistence of killing in an age of liberty disrupted the conceptual assumptions of progressive idealism”; while “the very inseparability of law and violence, never more painfully evident than in episodes of colonial war and legal emergency, collapsed the logical principles of non-contradiction and identity that remain our common sense.”

Freedom at sea

The Amistad case deals with an 1839 slave-ship rebellion seeking to reverse the middle passage. The rebels reimagine freedom in counterpoint to liberal freedom and legal authority—a domain that intertwined emancipation and enslavement, the age of liberty and the Black Atlantic, the distance between continents and tides binding them together, redemption of American humanism and attacks on Black humanity.

The Historians’ Preposterous Project

Contrasting its author’s microhistorical approach with other historical methodologies, especially that of Keith Thomas, Clendinnen praises Kirsten McKenzie’s A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) for deftly tying the apparently idiosyncratic stories of a transported convict and the noble family whose scion he impersonated to more pervasive dynamics in nineteenth-century British imperial culture.