Spontaneous Human Combustion and Claude-Nicolas Le Cat's Hunt for Fame
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3132570 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Meghan K Roberts (0009-0009-4962-9858, Bowdoin College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 93 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 749-782 |
| Publication date | 2021-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Modern History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-2801 • E-ISSN: 1537-5358 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/717020 |
| OpenAlex | W4200005474 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 49 |
This article discusses eighteenth-century ideas about spontaneous human combustion: the idea that the human body—but especially the bodies of idle and liquor-drinking women—could burst into flames with no external source. It focuses particularly on the ideas and career strategies of the author of the most well-known text on this phenomenon, the master surgeon, medical popularizer, and academician Claude-Nicolas Le Cat. Le Cat was deeply involved in efforts to popularize medicine and science and was, at the same time, a deeply ambitious individual anxious to elevate himself to ever-greater prominence. To accomplish these aims, he needed to find ways to attract attention for himself and his ideas while maintaining his image as a serious man of science and not a charlatan. He and other medical authors worked in a kind of feedback loop, in which their pessimistic views about health, modernity, and degeneration led them to imagine ambitious reform projects that would improve health by transforming society itself. To do so, they needed to grab the public’s attention, which encouraged them to state their fears and concerns in sensational and alarmist terms. The article contributes to the history of medicine and science and explores larger themes of celebrity, expertise, and publicity. Engaging the public, even as an expert, neither was nor is a purely rational exercise, and studying Le Cat’s public relations strategies as well as his ideas makes clear how fraught this endeavor could be
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Human body · Modernity · Pessimism · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Publicity · Sociology · State (computer science) · Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Law · Medical History and Innovations · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology
Feeding France
Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–1820
Suffering Scholars
The Scottish Enlightenment
Nobility Reimagined
Blood and Expertise
Butterfield’s nightmare
Monstrous Births and Medical Networks
The frightening borderlands of Enlightenment
The Haunting of Susan Lay
I dye [sic] by Inches
Old and in the way
Witnesses of the body
The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France
The Enlightenment in Practice
Anatomists and Entrepreneurs in Early Eighteenth-Century London
Breaking a Child's Will
Weekly Enlightenment
What Made Reading Dangerous in Eighteenth-Century France
Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century
Women and the Courts in the Control of Violence between Men
Trusting George Cheyne
The Care of the Self and the Masculine Birth of Science
Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy
Early Modern Perspectives on the Long History of Domestic Violence
Wonders and the order of nature
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |