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Sep. 7th, 2005 11:18 pmYou know when your mind wakes up with a start and you realise you have been trying to sort out something for months and have finally worked out what it was? OK, maybe not. Maybe other people think in minutes and hours rather than in geological epochs.
Anyway, I had a bad day health-wise today and that forced me to stop working for a few hours. My mind ticked over into another epoch and I could look back and realise that I have been getting quite interested in cultural acceptance of medical theory. Not enough to write about - just curiosity. I didn't even realise it was happening, though.
I have been interested in medieval medicine for a while, and just kind of accepted that at some stage the medieval cultural acceptance of medicine transmuted and took on modern traits and that, since then, lots of people have rubbished the earlier views.
I thought maybe it happened round the eighteenth century, since I know enough about the seventeenth century (I have read Bodin and Paracelsus, anyhow) to recognise a similar underlying world view to my Middle Ages. It had changed over time, but even Newton (who was I talking about this with recently?) mathematically analysed a basically Ptolemaic universe.
I was reading the chapter of Mackay I need for my current minimum opus (which continues to surprise me - how could I have been storing so much stuff for a novel without even knowing it? my brain is feeling like unexplored territory) and I realised that, though Mackay (writing mid 19th century) ridicules earlier medical notions, he still has some of the values from them. He is operating in the particular mix of world view I was envisaging for the eighteenth century. One of these days I am going to have to go back and read more bits of the Encyclopedie from an entirely new angle - I was taught it was modern in outlook when I read bits as an undergraduate and now I am wondering.
Whenever I teach the Middle Ages my students suffer me making links between the Middle Ages and now. It is a hook I use to help them hang knowledge and retain it. I shouldn't be surprised at how long the underlying world system stuff took to change, because each hook I make for my students shows a continuation or similarity between then and now. I am, though.
The pity is that most of my reading for the next little while is modern fiction and medieval history, but I might try to sneak in the occasional bit of other stuff. I am so curious as to who changed what views and when - not the scientific discovery side (which is what was deceiving me into assuming underlying change) but the everyday stuff.
And now I wonder if I can use this as an excuse to read cookbooks. I use everything as an excuse to read cookbooks, don't I?
Anyway, I had a bad day health-wise today and that forced me to stop working for a few hours. My mind ticked over into another epoch and I could look back and realise that I have been getting quite interested in cultural acceptance of medical theory. Not enough to write about - just curiosity. I didn't even realise it was happening, though.
I have been interested in medieval medicine for a while, and just kind of accepted that at some stage the medieval cultural acceptance of medicine transmuted and took on modern traits and that, since then, lots of people have rubbished the earlier views.
I thought maybe it happened round the eighteenth century, since I know enough about the seventeenth century (I have read Bodin and Paracelsus, anyhow) to recognise a similar underlying world view to my Middle Ages. It had changed over time, but even Newton (who was I talking about this with recently?) mathematically analysed a basically Ptolemaic universe.
I was reading the chapter of Mackay I need for my current minimum opus (which continues to surprise me - how could I have been storing so much stuff for a novel without even knowing it? my brain is feeling like unexplored territory) and I realised that, though Mackay (writing mid 19th century) ridicules earlier medical notions, he still has some of the values from them. He is operating in the particular mix of world view I was envisaging for the eighteenth century. One of these days I am going to have to go back and read more bits of the Encyclopedie from an entirely new angle - I was taught it was modern in outlook when I read bits as an undergraduate and now I am wondering.
Whenever I teach the Middle Ages my students suffer me making links between the Middle Ages and now. It is a hook I use to help them hang knowledge and retain it. I shouldn't be surprised at how long the underlying world system stuff took to change, because each hook I make for my students shows a continuation or similarity between then and now. I am, though.
The pity is that most of my reading for the next little while is modern fiction and medieval history, but I might try to sneak in the occasional bit of other stuff. I am so curious as to who changed what views and when - not the scientific discovery side (which is what was deceiving me into assuming underlying change) but the everyday stuff.
And now I wonder if I can use this as an excuse to read cookbooks. I use everything as an excuse to read cookbooks, don't I?