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Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies ‘Of all maladies the most common’. Explaining the ‘Age of Fevers’, 1770-1830

  • Thursday, 16. January 2025, 14:30 - 16:00
  • Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS), 010.01.05 (CATS Auditorium), Voßstraße 2, 69115 Heidelberg
    • Prof. Dr Stefanie Gänger, Universität Heidelberg, Historisches Seminar

Few topoi are more persistent in the western medical literature of the period between 1770 and 1830 than that of the frequency and prevalence of fevers. Fevers were ‘the most frequent of all diseases’, as the Scottish physician-author William Buchan put it in 1790; ‘more than one half of mankind [was] said to perish by [them]’. This lecture exposes and seeks to explain western medical writers’ untiring insistence on the commonness of fevers, between 1770 and 1830, the ‘Age of Fevers’ (J. Luis & Mariano Peset). The paper, in a first part, reviews the extant data on morbidity and mortality from ‘fever’ available to us for the Iberian, British, and French territories, to show that doctors’ impression was anything but a figment of the imagination. In a second part, it seeks to explain the prevalence of the diagnosis, ‘fever’, holding that its pervasiveness around 1800 was owing to several factors, ranging from that disease category’s epistemic scope to the period’s changing epidemiological landscape – the encounter with new, and more virulent ailments.

Visual, Apocalypse Now. Time, Historicity and Worlds After

Alle Termine der Veranstaltung 'Apocalypse Now. Time, Historicity and Worlds After'

Lecture Series

While periodization — the partition of time into segments with a specific beginning and end — is integral to historical method, it cannot be dissociated from a wider reflection on a key issue: the relation between emic time (time as perceived by historical actors) and etic time (time as established by the scholar’s historical narrative). The relation between emic and etic times is an essential methodological question within human, social, and even natural sciences. This lecture series looks at this this question through a particular lens: the “end of times” or “apocalypses.” How do historical actors perceive it? What happens to historiographical narratives when actors talk about the future as the “end” of time? How has such a vision of the future shaped narratives and periodization schemes? 

By focusing on “ends of times” and “apocalypse”, the tensions between time, temporalities and time horizons are to be discussed, both methodologically and empirically, in specific contexts. The three main areas are: 1) political history — the history of revolutions; 2) religious history — the history of last judgements and revelations; and 3) natural history — the history of pandemics, cataclysms and disasters. The first block (political history) will discuss the link between revolution and the end of time, starting with revolutions at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the Russian and Chinese revolutions. The second block (religious history) will consider perceptions of the end of time within some of the main religions, considering different takes on apocalyptic revelations, universal floods, millenarianisms and messianic movements. Finally, the third block (natural history) will discuss natural disasters and epidemics, and will feature the controversies over geological eras (such as the Anthropocene) and collapsology.

English