Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon – författare

This collection of essays seeks to challenge the notion of the supremacy of the brain as the key organ of the Enlightenment, by focusing on the workings of the bowels and viscera that so obsessed writers and thinkers during the long eighteenth-century. These inner organs and the digestive process acted as counterpoints to politeness and other modes of refined sociability, drawing attention to the deeper workings of the self. Moving beyond recent studies of luxury and conspicuous consumption, where dysfunctional bowels have been represented as a symptom of excess, this book seeks to explore other manifestations of the visceral and to explain how the bowels played a crucial part in eighteenth-century emotions and perceptions of the self. The collection offers an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective on entrails and digestion by addressing urban history, visual studies, literature, medical history, religious history, and material culture in England, France, and Germany.

This collection of essays seeks to challenge the notion of the supremacy of the brain as the key organ of the Enlightenment, by focusing on the workings of the bowels and viscera that so obsessed writers and thinkers during the long eighteenth-century. These inner organs and the digestive process acted as counterpoints to politeness and other modes of refined sociability, drawing attention to the deeper workings of the self. Moving beyond recent studies of luxury and conspicuous consumption, where dysfunctional bowels have been represented as a symptom of excess, this book seeks to explore other manifestations of the visceral and to explain how the bowels played a crucial part in eighteenth-century emotions and perceptions of the self. The collection offers an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective on entrails and digestion by addressing urban history, visual studies, literature, medical history, religious history, and material culture in England, France and Germany.

Ce livre se propose, à travers le portrait du traducteur Antoine Lasalle, d’éclairer la diffusion et la réception de la philosophie baconienne en France à la fin du XVIIIe siècle et pendant la première moitié du siècle suivant, mais aussi de montrer dans sa matérialité le travail du traducteur et l’influence de son réseau scientifique, politique et amical étendu sur la diffusion de l’œuvre de Francis Bacon en France entre la Révolution et la seconde restauration. Il se penche également sur le devenir de cette traduction – appelée de ses vœux par les encyclopédistes, puis par le Comité d’instruction publique – après sa publication. Elle a été violemment critiquée dès la sortie des premiers volumes par le géologue suisse André Deluc, qui considérait qu’elle faisait la promotion d’un Bacon athée. Elle a pourtant été rééditée partiellement à plusieurs reprises, avec ou sans le nom de son traducteur, avant que le travail de ce dernier soit paradoxalement réhabilité peu de temps avant sa mort dans un ouvrage à charge contre Bacon rédigé par le penseur catholique Joseph de Maistre.Through a portrait of the translator Antoine Lasalle, this book aims at shedding light on the circulation and reception of Baconian philosophy in France at the end of the eighteenth century. It explores the work of the translator and the influence of his extensive scientific, political and social network on the dissemination of Francis Bacon's works in France between the Revolution and the Second Restoration. It also looks at what happened to this particular translation – which was encouraged by the Encyclopédistes and then by the Comité d’Instruction publique – after it was published. As soon as the first volumes of the translation were published, it was fiercely criticised by Swiss geologist André Deluc, who thought it promoted an atheist version of Bacon’s philosophy. It was partially republished several times, with or without the name of its translator, before the latter's work was paradoxically rehabilitated shortly before his death in an indictment of Bacon written by the Catholic Joseph de Maistre.

This work reflects on hypochondria as well as on the global functioning of the human mind and on the place of the patient/physician relationship in the wider organisation of society. First published in 1711, revised and enlarged in 1730, and now edited and published with a critical apparatus for the first time, this is a major work in the history of medical literature as well as a complex literary creation. Composed of three dialogues between a physician and two of his patients, Mandeville’s Treatise mirrors the digressive structure of a talking cure. Thanks to the soothing and enlightening effects of this casual conversation, the physician Mandeville demonstrates the healing power of words for a class of patients that he presents as men of learning who need above all to be addressed in their own language. Mandeville’s aim was to delineate his own cure for hypochondria and hysteria, which consisted of a talking cure followed by diet and exercise, but also to discuss the practice of medicine in England and continental Europe at a time when physicians were beginning to lose ground to apothecaries. Opposing a purely theoretical approach to medicine, Mandeville takes up the principles presented by Francis Bacon, Thomas Sydenham, and Giorgio Baglivi, and advocates a medical practice based on experience and backed up by time-tested theories.