John Waller (1) (1972–)

A VERY short book in the Columbia University Revolutions in Science series. Does an unusually nice job of realistically discussing the development of the germ theory with frequent comments about Koch and Pasteur's personalities and what they stole from whom. Despite its brevity, little is excluded. There is no mention of Obermeier's discovery of Borrelia recurrentis or Petri and I don't think the Gram stain is mentioned specifically. I knew that Florence Nightengale was not a proponent of the germ theory, but I didn't know that she was so vocal about it. It isn't discussed here, but I think Virchow was also on the non-germ side. One of my favorite quotes (although not in this book) is from Friedrich Von Recklinghausen who said that attributing the etiology of tuberculosis to Koch's bacillus would be the same as attributing the origin of horse manure in the street to the sparrow that was sitting on it.… (mehr)

Robert Blincoe was a workhouse orphan who in 1799 at the age of 7 began an "apprenticeship" of some 14 years in cotton mills in appalling conditions that left him partially disabled for life. The core of this book is based around Blincoe's memoir, told to a radical journalist John Brown in the 1820s. Interspersed with what we know of Blincoe's life from that source, is well researched information from other sources bearing on his life and times, including an account of the factory reform movement and the long-running campaign for a maximum 10 hour working day which dominated the early decades of the 19th century. The book also traces what we know about Blincoe's later life as a fairly successful businessman who had overcome huge adversity, and recounts the lives of his children, especially his son Robert who was a popular clergyman.

The book contains accounts of the lives and actions of a wide range of personalities involved in the campaign to better the lives of children working in factories in the early industrial revolution, including radical journalists like John Brown, early trades unionists such as John Doherty, benign factory owners such as Robert Owen, and, within Parliament, figures like the Tory Lord Ashley (future Earl of Shaftesbury) who led many successful parliamentary campaigns for progressive social causes. One noteworthy point at the political level was how quite often it was Tories who were in the forefront of the campaigns for progressive legislation in Parliament, rather than Whigs (future Liberals), as one might expect from a modern viewpoint. Whigs were more closely identified with the rising class of industrialists like the mill owners, whereas there was a strain of paternalistic and romantic Toryism that saw the industrialists as upstarts interfering with the old fashioned relationship where a benevolent landowner at least decently looked after the workers and peasants on his estate, despite the huge gulf between them.

The title of the book stems from the possibility that the young Charles Dickens had read Blincoe's memoir before he wrote Oliver Twist; at the time he was also a Parliamentary reporter so would have been well aware of the debates around factory reform legislation. There is no direct evidence, but the events in Oliver's early life do match quite closely to those of Blincoe's. A closer literary link is with Frances Trollope's Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, which we know for a fact draws for its dramatic incidents on many features of the memoir - a pity that this novel has not achieved the fame of Dickens's masterpiece.

This is a great read about a key turning point in Britain's history, and one man's involvement in it as a victim but who also overcame adversity and made a decent life for himself and his family.… (mehr)

Deals with the various ways famous scientists have not been wholly detached when handling their material, then offers another account of the science v religion debate with some fascinating extra insights. Deals with the idea that clergy resisted obstetric anaesthesia, and one of the people who initiated the idea of a conflict was the pioneer Simpson, a committed Christian! Talks about Darwin's problems with evolution until genetics proved it, long after his time. Also with Huxley's resistance to "amateur" scientists, and his desire to push the distinction between reason and faith.… (mehr)

On reading this book we can, perhaps, maybe, likely let ourselves imagine what it must have, nay ought to have, been like to conceivably have experienced the Dancing Plague of 1518.

Perchance.

In The Dancing Plague, John Waller writes about an episode of dance mania (or choreomania) which affected a group of people in the city of Strasbourg (now in eastern France but in the early sixteenth century a predominantly German-speaking city) in 1518, leading them to dance ceaselessly and unwillingly in public for days on end. This is a curious historical event but one which—as you might have gathered from the mild sarcasm of my opening—one which is poorly documented, and one which Waller does not do justice to.

I frequently complain about books which really should have been journal articles or New Yorker essays. I'm not sure that The Dancing Plague could even be that much, at least not if it were to focus solely on the 1518 occurrence rather than any of the previous outbreaks of choreomania. Medievalists know how to do a lot with a fragmentary sourcebase, but what Waller has to work with is thin indeed. Not all the large type or the conjuring up of "must have thoughts" or "probably felts" can hide that.

As best as I can tell (because there's no bibliography, only end notes), Waller drew very heavily on secondary sources, and undertook no archival research in writing this book. To be fair, this is because a lot of the archives in Strasbourg were destroyed during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s. However, the fact that the Bibliothèque nationale de France has been digitising a lot of antiquarian regional journals in recent years means that I can sit right here on my couch and look at much of what Waller does cite by way of primary sources (once I compensated for the fact that some of his citations are to the wrong page numbers), and it's even more meagre than Waller admits to. He refers on several occasions to contemporary "chronicle accounts" of the 1518 outbreak. Having looked at the three he returns to the most (the Imlin’schen Family Chronicle, the Duntzenheim Chronicle, and the Annals of Sebastian Brant), and granted that sixteenth-century German isn't my strongest language, none of these "accounts" are more than a short paragraph in length. I'm pretty sure that's not going to be obvious to the average reader of this book. Those accounts which are somewhat more detailed—for instance, ones which provide the name of the supposed Patient Zero, one Frau Troffea—also date to at least several years after the events.

That's a problem.

And of course there's the fact that as best as I can tell, Waller isn't a medievalist—his primary research focus, according to his faculty profile, is the history of medicine in the nineteenth century. It's not impossible for someone to write good history outside of their primary research area, of course. But Waller clearly has a limited understanding of late medieval history, whether that's how chronicles were compiled (he seems to think that the fact that other chronicles said the same thing about the Dancing Plague is proof of the veracity of the accounts from Strasbourg, as opposed to there being a long tradition of chroniclers reworking material from other sources—chroniclers weren't investigative journalists), how the Church worked, or the existence of civic public health legislation, or sumptuary laws, and on and on.

Waller's treatment of faith and religious history is the most egregious part of the book, though—and I say this as an atheist who was raised Catholic who has no fondness for the institution of the Church. Waller clearly not only does not understand the mentalities of late medieval Christians, he doesn't care to. He shows no awareness that many of his assertions are really assumptions derived from the dominant, anti-Catholic Anglo-Protestant historiographies of the nineteenth century. Medieval Catholics were "hooked on a mystical form of piety" (14), read "works of macabre theology" (43), and professed beliefs determined by "theological casuistry" (107) and "esoteric symbolism" (164). The forms of Protestant Christianity which were to emerge in the sixteenth century were, it's heavily implied, "more conventional" (174) and rational. Medieval Christianity on the other hand was primitive, and medieval people did not think that the world was "intelligible and rationally ordered." (190)

Somewhere, Augustine of Hippo is sputtering. (Fides quaerens intellectum!)

Towards the end of the book, Waller looks at events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which may be parallels to the Dancing Plague of 1518, from female hysterics in Victorian Britain to shellshocked WWI veterans. His arguments here are moderately convincing, but all of that pales to his discussion of instances in Tanzanian and Malagasy history, which frankly made me suck in a breath at the racist underpinnings of his thinking.

Bad from start to finish. Avoid.… (mehr)