PubMed Health⌕ Search
Home/Archive/PubMed

PubMed · 11619012

John Cheyne's classic monographs.

J B Lyons
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

John Cheyne (1777-1836), a Scotsman born in Leith, graduated at Edinburgh University but spent most of his career in Dublin. He was professor of medicine (1813-19) at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, physician to the House of Industry Hospitals and co-founder of the Dublin Hospital Reports in which his celebrated account of a patient with irregular breathing was described in 1818. His Essay on hydrocephalus acutus (1808) and Cases of apoplexy and lethargy (1812), important nineteenth-century contributions to neuropathology are considered here in detail. Towards the end of his life he was afflicted by depression and his posthumously-published Essays on the partial derangement of the mind (1843) was written as a therapeutic exercise.

Explore related subjects

History, 18th CenturyHistory, 19th CenturyHumansIrelandMental DisordersNervous System DiseasesNeurologyUnited KingdomBiographyHistorical ArticleJournal ArticlePortrait

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

J B Lyons. 1995. John Cheyne's classic monographs.. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647049509525624

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related citations

PubMed2006

Kant on the history of nature: the ambiguous heritage of the critical philosophy for natural history.

This paper seeks to show Kant's importance for the formal distinction between descriptive natural history and a developmental history of nature that entered natural history discussions in the late eighteenth century. It is argued that he developed this distinction initially upon Buffon's distinctions of 'abstract' and 'physical' truths, and applied these initially in his distinction of 'varieties' from 'races' in anthropology. In the 1770s, Kant appears to have given theoretical preference to the 'history' of nature [Naturgeschichte] over 'description' of nature [Naturbeschreibung]. Following Kant's confrontations with Johann Herder and Georg Forster in the late 1780s, Kant weakened the epistemic status of the 'history of nature' and gave theoretical preference to 'description of nature'. As a result, Kant's successors, such as Goethe, could draw from Kant either a justification for a developmental history of nature, or, as this paper argues, a warrant from the critical philosophy for denying the validity of the developmental history of nature as anything more than a 'regulative' idea of reason.

History, 18th Century↗
PubMed2006

Psychophysics, intensive magnitudes, and the psychometricians' fallacy.

As an aspiring science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, psychology pursued quantification. A problem was that degrees of psychological attributes (most importantly, then, intensities of sensations) were experienced only as greater than, less than, or equal to one another. They were categorised as intensive magnitudes. The meaning of this concept was shifting, from that of an attribute possessing underlying quantitative structure (the medieval and Kantian meaning) to that of a merely ordinal attribute (its dominant twentieth-century meaning). This fluidity allowed psychologists to claim that their attributes were intensive magnitudes (because ordered) and measurable (because intensive magnitudes). This claim was supported by an argument that order entails quantity. As adapted by psychometricians, the argument was that if an attribute is ordered, then the differences between its degrees are quantitative and, therefore, measurable. However, in a paper ignored in psychology for six decades, the issue was resolved mathematically and the resolution implies that the psychometricians' argument was fallacious.

History, 18th Century↗