Astrologie in der Frühen Neuzeit | Beiträge zur Ideengeschichte der Astrologie im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Cabinets de curiosités. The Renaissance Mathematicus | Just another WordPress.com weblog. The Galileo Project. Res Obscura. Buffon et l'histoire naturelle : l'édition en ligne. Blog | Darin Hayton. At the end of the 18th century Thomas Scattergood spoke out against what he considered the harsh treatment people suffering from mental illness and advocated for the “humane treatment” of patients in asylums. Scattergood was an influential local Quaker who traveled extensively in the states and in England. In the early 19th century, he suggested to the Philadelphia Yearly meeting that they should do more to care for members who suffered from mental illnesses, who “may be deprived of the use of their reason.”
He worked with other members of the Philadelphia Yearly meeting to establish the Friends Hospital, an asylum for their insane brethren, which would furnish besides the requisite medical aid, such tender and sympathetic attention, and religious oversight as may sooth their agitated minds and thereby under the divine blessing, facilitate their restoration to the inestimable gift of reason. The Friends Hospital is often celebrated as the U.S.’s first mental hospital. Early Modern Experimental Philosophy, University of Otago, New Zealand. Kirsten Walsh writes… In a recent post, I considered Newton’s use of observation and experiment in the Opticks. I suggested that there is a functional (rather than semantic) difference between Newton’s ‘experiments’ and ‘observations’. Although both observations and experiments were reports of observations involving intervention on target systems and manipulation of independent variables, experiments offered individual, and crucial, support for particular propositions, whereas observations only supported propositions collectively.
At the end of the post, I suggested that, if we view them as complex, open ended series’ of experiments, the observations of books 2 and 3 look a lot like what Bacon called ‘experientia literata’, the method by which natural histories were supposed to be generated. The ‘Latin natural histories’ were Bacon’s works of natural history, as opposed to his works about natural history. The following features were typical of the experientia literata: