2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
from religious services for three days? Could it be the sin of having indulged
in those foods—meat especially—that were normally prohibited? In my paper,
I shall examine some of the dualities that characterize the time of bloodletting:
how it was that this event was deemed medically necessary, while in some
sense being emblematic of sin and how, if minuti had sinned, they also
symbolized Christ, who (to use an image common at the time) had been
phlebotomized on the cross to cure humanity of the sins of the five senses. I
shall argue that the time of bloodletting is representative of broader debates
about the place of physical medicine in Christianity, and that the compromises
reached acknowledged the importance of medicine, while affirming the priority
given to the religious life. Bloodletting itself was acknowledged to be a crucial
part of maintaining health, but the times to bleed were dictated not by medical
authority, but by the avoidance of disruption to monastic life. Thus, bleeding
was forbidden not in extreme seasons or when the moon was waxing or even
on Egyptian days, but near major feast days, or when where was a fast that
could not be broken.
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Richard Yeo Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
A Solution to the Multitude of Books:
Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1728) as “the Best Book in the Universe”
In making the audacious claim referred to in my title, Chambers was able
to draw on an earlier intellectual and educational tradition—the Renaissance
tradition of commonplaces and the practice of keeping commonplace books.
He was also able to put this legacy to work in another context—the debates
stimulated by the 1710 copyright Statute. This paper looks at two senses
in which Chambers regarded and promoted his Cyclopaedia (2 vols, 1728):
1) as a scientific dictionary that promised to replace other books, condensing
knowledge of the arts and sciences into two large folio volumes 2) as a
work conceived as having a structure or design, planned by an author.
Chambers faced contemporary anxieties about the explosion of books and
new scientific discoveries by asserting that knowledge had to be reduced
to essentials and collated in an accessible work. In stressing that this could
be achieved in an alphabetical dictionary without losing a grasp of the
circle of sciences and the integrity of individual subjects, he depended on
an analogy with a commonplace book arranged under Heads. At the same
time, this analogy reinforced his contention that dictionary makers were
absolved of the charge of plagiarism because they collected knowledge
from a range of sources as a public service. Moreover, by affirming that
his work betrayed scholarly abridgement and conceptual design—again
with allusions to the commonplace tradition—he defended it as one worthy
of a copyright in a period in which the meaning of intellectual property
was being fiercely contested.