Evolution of Scientific Perspective
John Bell
In the 1700s, surgeons and doctors didn’t have x-rays and modern medicine to learn about the human body. Instead, students were taught by dissecting corpses as well as seeing illustrations of corpses with the anatomy being drawn over them. A illustration from the book, Engravings of the bones, muscles, and joints from the Anatomy of the Human Body by John Bell show the corpse of a man who was hung (Figure 1, Strauss Health Sciences Library copy first viewed at CUAM; image, NIH). The man had broken his neck which is why his head rests on the shoulder the way it does. This was one of their only ways they were able to learn and find new ways to do surgeries. The other ways they learned of were from real life patients. It was because of the volunteering of patients and doctors that complicated surgeries were being done on a more regular basis to help increase knowledge. Randolph Fillmore writes that, “The years between 1700 and 1799 stand out as important to medical history and surgical advancement because surgeons were willing – as must have been the patients – to attempt amputations as well as complicated and often heroic surgeries on major organs of the body, all without benefits of anesthesia, which did not come along until the nineteenth century” (Fillmore). It was because of these “heroic surgeries” that surgeries were able to begin perfecting and people are now often saved from life threatening events.
- Theo Hussen
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot was born October 5th in the year 1713 who studied philosophy at a Jesuit college before studying law. He became a writer in 1734 causing his father to disown him. During this time he lived a bohemian lifestyle and wrote many of his best-known works for a decade. In 1751, Diderot created the Encyclopedie alongside Jean le Rond d'Alembert and many other contributors, many of whom either left the project or were jailed due to the controversies surrounding its secular nature. Diderot struggled financially throughout a majority of his career until he was offered a position as Empress Catherine the Great’s librarian where he served for the rest of his life ("Denis Diderot").
Impact of the Encyclopedia
The Encyclopédie was, at the time, the culmination of human knowledge in a variety of fields and topics, reorganizing knowledge based on human reason. The purpose of this book is to “change the way people think” and for people to be able to inform themselves and know things (Diderot, quoted in "Encyclopédie"). Diderot wanted to collapse as much of the world’s knowledge as possible into the Encyclopédie and hoped that the information within it would disseminate into the public and future generations. The Encyclopedie played an important role in the intellectual forefront leading into the French Revolution, as written in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, no other encyclopedia “has been of such political importance or has occupied so conspicuous a place in the civil and literary history of its century”(Encyclopædia Britannica, quoted in "Encyclopédie").
Figurative System of Human Knowledge
The authors of the Encyclopedie, Diderot and d’Alembert, developed a tree to represent the structure of knowledge itself known as the “figurative system of human knowledge.” The main focus of the tree were the three branches of knowledge: Memory/History, Reason/Philosophy, and Imagination/Poetry. The taxonomy of all knowledge known to mankind including religion significantly affected the controversy surrounding the work. Due to this controversy the Encyclopedie and many of its contributors suffered attacks and attempts at censorship by the clergy and other censors, threatening the lives of the project and the authors ("Encyclopédie").
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, another prominent editor of the Encyclopédie and “tree of Diderot and d’Alembert,” was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. He alongside Diderot served as the editors for the Encyclopédie and authored over a thousand articles for it including the “Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot ("Jean le Rond d'Alembert").
- Jonathan Ro
