harvard-university-faculty

"The West, at bottom, is a form of society, rather than an area. It is the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land. By this application, a new environment is suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is opened, the cake of custom is broken, and new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new ideals, are brought into existence. The wilderness disappears, the "West" proper passes on to a new frontier, and in the former area, a new society has emerged from its contact with the backwoods. [...] Decade after decade, West after West, this rebirth of American society has gone on, has left its traces behind it, and has reacted on the East."

"American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Sarah Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier. Not the constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America for three centuries while it occupied its empire."

"Manifest Destiny and imperialism were traps into which the nation was led in 1846 and in 1899, and from which it extricated itself as well as it could afterward."

"With the age-old goal of universal prosperity within sight, we must question whether the methods—technological values and virtues, the instrumental goals of our affluent society—that help us approach this goal will serve to take us beyond it."

"Perhaps it is symbolic that Brook Farm, initially the most American of our Utopian communities, perished in a holocaust and was never fully rebuilt. A parallel destiny has pursued not only the other attempts to implement Utopian vision in this country, but the Utopian spirit in American life as a whole. As thinkers, Americans rarely if ever now attempt to construct an imaginary society better than that in which they live; and at the same time, the faith that our society is in some sense a Utopia has surely disappeared....But if we define Utopia as any attempt to make imaginatively concrete the possibilities of the future, Utopias have not in our own day ceased to exist, but have merely been transvalued....Our visions of the future have shifted from images of hope to vistas of despair; Utopias have become warnings, not beacons. Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy, and ironically even Skinner's Walden Two—the vast majority of our serious visions of the future are negative visions, extensions of the most pernicious trends of the present."

"Is it that we think the brain too small a place to hold more than one language at a time? That room for Spanish or Navajo will leave too little room for English? Is it that we fear that other ways of speaking will lead to an understanding of other ways of life, and so weaken commitment to our own? Is it perhaps that command of languages is assigned to a sphere of culture reserved for girls and women, something not suitable for boys and men?Whatever the reasons, the United States is a country rich in many things, but poor in knowledge of itself with regard to language."

"Ibn al-Shatir’s forgotten model was rediscovered in the late 1950’s by E. S. Kennedy. .. In a preliminary work, the Commentariolus, he [Copernicus] employed an arrangement equivalent to Ibn al-Shatir's. Later, in De revolutionibus, he reverted to the use of eccentric orbits, adopting a model that was the sun-centered equivalent of the one developed at Maragha. Could Copernicus have been influenced by the Maragha astronomers or by Ibn al-Shatir? ...some of the al-Tusi material is known to have reached Rome in the 15th century (many Greek manuscripts were carried west after the fall of Constantinople in 1453), but there is no evidence that Copernicus ever saw It... . I personally believe he could have invented the method independently."

"Some of the al-Tusi material is known to have reached Rome in the 15th century... but there is no evidence that Copernicus ever saw it.…I personally believe he could have invented the method independently."

"Going back to the earliest years of the Republic, we find that Black Americans, while being exploited as slaves and workers, and while being shunned socially into rural and urban ghettos, have nonetheless been embraced culturally. Few other groups, with the possible exception of the Jews of Europe, have contributed more to the culture of the group that dominated and excluded them, than black Americans—in music, dance, theatre, literature, sports and more generally in the style and vibrancy of its dominant culture, America is indelibly blackish. Trying to imagine America without blacks, is like trying to imagine Lake Erie without oxygen."

"The present wave of immigrants and their children are rapidly assimilating into an ever-vibrant American mainstream culture, and at a pace greater than the Europeans who came during the previous large wave"

"Praised across the humanities as a Renaissance scholar, Patterson has written globally influential books on slavery and its opposite pole, freedom. His works are profoundly interdisciplinary, mining comparative histories and insisting on the complex significance of culture."

"...Despite the critical acclaim for his fiction, the young scholar cooled to writing additional novels after a visit to , the legendary Barbados-born writer and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner. Patterson found Lamming living in a remote one-room apartment, a bed-sit, above a cottage in north London, and decided to stick with the regular paychecks of academia."

"...It is truly amazing that, for all this progress black Americans remain today almost as socially segregated as they were in the late sixties; that for all this cultural and political progress, combined with striking changes in the racial attitudes of white Americans, black Americans are still twice as unemployed as white Americans, that they continue to earn 65% of the median income of white Americans, exactly the same proportion that they earned in 1970, that the typical white household has 16 times the wealth of a black one, that one in 3 black youth are certain to spend part of their lives in prison, that the police of this nation still enter and treat black neighborhoods as if they are an occupying army and still feel empowered to cut down our black youth with impunity."

"Pessimism is a self-fulfilling malady."

"A year ago, Harvard's commencement, our graduation, was really, in a significant way, disrupted by students protesting, including some faculty protesting, marching out of the graduation, speakers denouncing the president and the corporation of Harvard, which is what we call our board of directors. This year, commencement was pretty much the polar opposite. There was literally a standing ovation for our president, Alan Garber, when all he had done was come up to the podium. And speaker after speaker hinted at the importance of supporting the university. So what's happened is that Donald Trump's assault on the university has led to a deep unification of the campus. And that's an important transformation from a year ago. I would say it's a fundamental transformation."

"Terry Gross: "The attacks on Harvard started with the task force commissioned by Trump to address antisemitism on campus. And, you know, this has led to cancellation of billions of dollars in grants and contracts to Harvard. But didn't Harvard reach a settlement with Trump over antisemitism?" Noah Feldman: "No. Let me tell the story a little bit differently. I think, really, what we're facing now started with the testimony in Congress of Harvard's president and a couple of other university presidents in which they were pushed very hard on a series of hypothetical questions about how the campus manages free speech in the context of protests. That put a target on Harvard's back, and the Trump administration has been pushing very, very hard since they came into office to exploit the perception - in my view, the incorrect perception - that Harvard is some sort of hotbed of bias, antisemitism and Islamophobia in order to bring about a fundamental attack on higher education with the stated goal - this is their stated goal - of making the university align itself with the administration's beliefs and priorities, which is a clear violation of the First Amendment. What's more, Harvard hasn't reached any settlement of any kind with the Trump administration. There was a lawsuit brought by a small number of students alleging that Harvard had not sufficiently protected the environment against antisemitism. And that was settled by the university before the Trump administration even came into office.""

"It's very unusual for the framers' predictions to come true that precisely, and when they do we have to ask ourselves. Some day, we will no longer be alive, and we will go wherever it is we go, the good place or the other place, and we may meet there Madison and Hamilton. And they will ask us, 'When the president of the United States acted to corrupt the structure of the republic, what did you do?' And our answer to that question must be that we followed the guidance of the framers, and it must be that if the evidence supports that conclusion, that the House of Representatives moves to impeach him."

"... spacetime as a concept leads to some … where the equations fail. This happens in the interiors of the black holes when spacetime somehow collapses ... And, also, most importantly it happened in the beginning of the Big Bang."

"Terry Gross: "Are you playing any official or unofficial role on Harvard's legal strategy or decision-making?" Noah Feldman: "No. The university follows a good policy of creating a wall between its lawyers who represent it and its law faculty who have lots of ideas about how it should be represented. So my primary role is as a constitutional scholar, analyzing the issues, writing about them, speaking about them. And that's the right job for me in this moment.""

"Terry Gross: One of Trump's justifications for canceling government contracts is that he accused Harvard as being a breeding ground - I'm quoting here - "breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination." How do you interpret that?" Noah Feldman: "Well, first thing I would say is that it's wrong. You know, it's always hard to understand exactly what is meant when you're being maligned, but, you know, you know the feeling. You know the idea that even a dog knows the difference between being tripped over and being kicked? Well, that's someone kicking us. One piece of relevant background here is that Harvard was one of the parties in the Supreme Court case - the SFFA case - in which the Supreme Court, for the first time in nearly 50 years, overturned the idea that racial diversity was a permissible rationale to use in college admissions. And the Trump administration, in all of its rhetoric, has been referring, subsequently, to the perfectly lawful use of diversity as it existed from 1978 and really before then, until just, you know, a year or so ago as, quote-unquote, "discrimination." I think that's the rhetorical move there. And Harvard is no more a breeding ground for that point of view than all of the other universities in the country, essentially all, which used exactly the same admissions procedures. It's just that it's easier for Trump to make headlines by attacking Harvard over that." Terry Gross: "That's probably part of the reason why many other universities are worried right now." Noah Feldman: "There are a lot of reasons for universities to be concerned. If Trump can go after the oldest university in the United States, one of the most significant in terms of its endowment and its academic legacy and its prestige, then he can really go after any similar university. And so all universities, I think, have very, very good reason to be concerned because going after a university is one of the things in the playbook of someone who's trying to erode democratic values and who wants to be at least dictatorial, if not a dictator. Universities are a place for the preservation of free expression, free ideas and free beliefs. They've always been that. And so in any country where someone is trying to break that norm of freedom, the universities are a very important target, and that's been true historically.""

"Interestingly, both quantum entanglement and s date back to two articles written by Albert Einstein and his collaborators in 1935. On the surface, the papers seem to deal with very different phenomena, and Einstein probably never suspected that there could be a connection between them. In fact, entanglement was a property of quantum mechanics that greatly bothered the German physicist, who called it How ironic that it now may offer a to extend his relativity theory to the quantum realm."

"It has been a long-standing challege for to construct a theory of quantum gravity. String theory is the leading candidate for a quantum theory of gravity. General Relativity has the seeds of its own destruction in it, since smooth can evolve into singular field configurations ... Classically this is not a problem if the singularities are hidden behind s ... since this means that nothing can come out from the region containing the singularity. However, Hawking showed, under very general assumptions, that quantum mechanics implies that black holes emit particles ... In his approximation this radiation is exactly thermal and contains no information about the state of the black hole. This leads to the , since particles can fall in carrying information but what comes out is featureless thermal radiation ... Hawking argued that this would lead to non-unitary evolution, so that one of the basic principles of quantum mechanics would have to be modified."

"Harvard Law Prof. Noah Feldman's testimony during Wednesday's impeachment hearing took a turn for the mystical Wednesday afternoon, when he seemed to claim that impeaching President Trump was necessary so that lawmakers would be able to answer to Alexander Hamilton and James Madison when they bump into them in the afterlife. Feldman was fielding questions from attorney Norm Eisen, who questioned witnesses at the behest of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., when he claimed that Trump's actions were exactly what the framers of the Constitution forewarned. Immediately prior to the morbid warning, Feldman claimed he had been an "impeachment skeptic" when Robert Mueller's Russia report came out. But he said that changed after President Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that resulted in the impeachment inquiry due to suspicion that the president sought help in investigating political rivals."

"These of are very powerful. Let us recall the situation in flat space. If we have a massive in flat space then we can always boost to a . In AdS it is the same: if we consider the oscillating trajectory of a massive particle then we can "boost" to a frame where the particle is at rest. Thus, the moving particle does not know that is moving and, despite appearances, there is no "center" in AdS. The is part of the (as in the ) and there are several choices of Hamiltonian. Once we choose a Hamiltonian ... then we have chosen a "center" and a notion of the , in which a particle sits at this "center.""

"Terry Gross: "So what do you think Trump's attacks on Harvard are really about?" Noah Feldman: "Donald Trump usually has a kind of short-term self-interest objective and then a broader-term aggrandizement objective. In the short term, his self-interest is to make a headline, to make a populist headline that says, Donald Trump is going after those liberals at Harvard University, which might please some of his supporters and, probably more important to Donald Trump, is intended to shed fear or to cast fear on everyone in higher education and, more broadly, everyone who doesn't agree with his policies. You know, it's part of the idea that every day we should wake up and listen to the radio or look at the newspaper and discover that the Trump administration has gone after some opponent in some way that makes it really hard to stand up to Donald Trump. So I think that's the short-term objective. The longer-term objective, though, is part of Trump's overall assault on our democratic values and institutions. And you can see that the institutions that he likes to go after are places like universities, institutions like the press and the courts, which are institutions that are all devoted to independent judgment and independent thinking. We need independent universities. We need an independent press. And, of course, we need independent courts. And Trump doesn't like independence because independent institutions can say no to him. And the more he can weaken the independence of those institutions, the more he can make his agenda the dominant agenda. And ultimately, this is about Trump trying to impose his view of the world on everybody else.""

"In most situations, the contradictory requirements of quantum mechanics and general relativity are not a problem, because either the quantum effects or the gravitational effects are so small that they can be neglected or dealt with by approximations. When the of spacetime is very large, however, the quantum aspects of gravity become significant. It takes a very large or a great concentration of mass to produce much spacetime curvature. Even the curvature produced near the sun is exceedingly small compared with the amount needed for quantum gravity effects to become apparent. Though these effects are completely negligible now, they were very important in the beginning of the big bang, which is why a quantum theory of gravity is needed to describe how the big bang started. Such a theory is also important for understanding what happens at the center of black holes, because matter there is crushed into a region of extremely high curvature. Because gravity involves spacetime curvature, a quantum gravity theory will also be a theory of quantum spacetime ..."

"Throughout history, security as much as status has been an obstacle to summitry. In 1419 France was in turmoil from war with the English and a power struggle provoked by the periodic insanity of King Charles VI. On September 10 the dauphin, Charles’ son, conferred on a bridge near Rouen with their archrival, John, Duke of Burgundy. Both men were well attended by guards and a barrier had been erected in the middle, with a wicket gate bolted on either side to allow passage only by mutual consent. During the conference Duke John was persuaded to come through the gate—only to be cut down by the dauphin’s bodyguard. The dauphin, inheriting the throne as Charles VII, recovered much of France from the English. When his son, Louis XI, met the Yorkist king Edward IV at Picquigny near Amiens in 1475 to conclude a peace treaty, the fate of Duke John was much in mind. The chronicler Philippe de Commines tells how this conference was held on a bridge over the Somme. Louis insisted that across the middle of the bridge and along its sides his carpenters should build "a strong wooden lattice, such as lions’ cages are made with, the hole between each bar being no wider than to thrust in a man’s arm." The two kings somehow managed to embrace between the holes and conducted their meeting in secure cordiality."

"Although by about 1500 several strong national states had emerged in Europe, they remained greatly dependent on their monarchs. This kind of personalized power is at the heart of summitry. One of the most famous encounters took place on the so-called Field of the Cloth of Gold in June 1520, bringing together Henry VIII of England and François I of France. The young English monarch, whose titles still included "King of France," had resumed the old struggle in 1512. But his advisor Cardinal Thomas Wolsey secured a truce and then arranged a summit to consummate an enduring peace. It took place on the edge of Calais, the last English enclave in France, in a shallow dip known as the Val d’Or. Both sides of the valley were carefully reshaped to ensure that neither party enjoyed a height advantage. A special pavilion was constructed for the meeting and festivities, surrounded by thousands of tents and a three-hundred-foot-square timber castle for the rest of those attending. Henry’s entourage alone numbered more than five thousand, while the French crown needed ten years to pay off its share of the cost. [...] At the appointed hour on June 7, 1520, the Feast of Corpus Christi, the two monarchs with their retinues in full battle array appeared on the opposite sides of the valley. There was a moment of tense silence—each side feared an ambush by the other. Then the two kings spurred their horses forward to the appointed place marked by a spear in the ground and embraced. The ice was broken. They dismounted and went into the pavilion arm in arm to talk. Then began nearly two weeks of jousting, feasting and dancing that culminated in a High Mass in the open air. Choirs from England and France accompanied the mass and there was a sermon on the virtues of peace. In both choreography and cost, the Field of the Cloth of Gold resembles contemporary summits. In a further similarity, style was more important than substance: by 1521 the two countries were at war again. In many ways they were natural rivals, whereas Henry was bound—by marriage and interest—to France’s enemy Charles V, king of Spain. Both before and after the Cloth of Gold Henry met Charles for discussions of much greater diplomatic magnitude. And although Wolsey hoped the meeting of the British and French elites might build bridges, this soon proved an illusion. As the Cloth of Gold demonstrated, egos were everything in these summits, with each side alert to any hint of advantage gained summits by the other. Commines was implacably opposed to such meetings for this very reason. It was, he said, impossible "to hinder the train and equipage of the one from being finer and more magnificent than the other, which produces mockery, and nothing touches any person more sensibly than to be laughed at.""

"The origins of diplomacy date back at least to the Bronze Age in the Near East. Caches of documents from the Euphrates kingdom in the mid–eighteenth century BC and from Akhenaten’s Egypt four centuries later reveal a regular exchange of envoys with neighboring states, prompted by the need for trade and the danger of war. This was hardly a fully fledged diplomatic "system." Envoys were not resident ambassadors and they were not protected by agreed rules of immunity—but it was a recognizable form of diplomacy."

"The importance of status is vividly illustrated by perhaps the most celebrated summit in German history: the meeting at Canossa in 1077 between Pope Gregory VII and Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. In German this is known as der Canossagang, the journey to Canossa; more aptly in Italian as l’umiliazione di Canossa, for it was truly a humiliation. In the Investiture Controversy—the power struggle between pope and emperor over the right to appoint bishops—Henry had renounced Gregory as pope, only to find himself excommunicated. This papal edict not only imperilled Henry’s immortal soul, it also laid him open to revolt by the German nobility. He sought a meeting with Gregory who, fearing violence, retreated to the castle of Canossa, in safe territory south of Parma. This forced the emperor to come to him. What exactly happened is shrouded in legend, but supposedly Henry arrived in the depths of winter, barefoot and in a pilgrim’s hair shirt, only to be kept waiting by Gregory for three days. When he was finally admitted to the castle on January 28, 1077, the emperor knelt before the pope and begged forgiveness. He was absolved and the two most powerful figures in Christendom then shared the Mass. The reconciliation was short-lived. After being excommunicated a second time Henry crossed the Alps with his army and replaced Gregory with an “antipope” of his own. But the events themselves matter less than the myth that grew up around them. During the German Reformation Henry was lionized as the defender of national rights and the scourge of the Catholic pope, often being dubbed “the first Protestant.” And during Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s struggle to rein in the Catholic church, he famously declared in the Reichstag on May 14, 1872: “We will not go to Canossa, neither in body nor in spirit.” He was voicing the new German Reich’s resolve to accept no outside interference in its affairs—political or religious. As a result Henry IV shivering outside the gates of Canossa became a familiar figure in late-nineteenth-century German art; the phrase “to go to Canossa” (nach Canossa gehen) entered the language as a synonym for craven surrender—almost the equivalent of "Munich" to the British and Americans."

"In the heyday of the Byzantine Empire its rulers tried to manage affairs from Constantinople, either bringing foreign rulers to their court or conducting negotiations by letters and by envoys who acted as the self-styled "voice of kings." In 1096 and 1097 the emperor Alexis Comnenos made a point of meeting the leaders of the First Crusade in his own palace, as did Manuel Comnenos when the Second Crusade arrived in 1147. But when Byzantium spiralled into decline in the fourteenth century, its emperors became as mobile as those of the late Roman Empire, and much less potent. Emperor Manuel II was reduced to touring the courts of Italy, France, Germany and England for help against the Ottoman Turks, handing out precious books and pieces of the supposed tunic of Christ as inducements. This was the diplomacy of desperation: Byzantium fell to the Turks in 1453, less than thirty years after Manuel’s death."

"It became normal to have at each of the major courts a resident "ambassador"—a word defined by the English poet and diplomat Sir Henry Wotton in a punning epigram as “a man sent to lie abroad for his country’s good.” Given the time required for travel, and the hazards en route—especially in an age of dynastic and religious warfare—permanent ambassadors offered a convenient substitute for personal summitry. And their detailed reports required the attention of specialist secretaries who oversaw foreign affairs, such as Francis Walsingham in Elizabethan London or Antonio Perez at the court of Philip III. Day-to-day diplomacy tended to slip out of the hands of rulers."

"Unlike the French government, Britain had no formal obligations to Czechoslovakia. A cardinal axiom of British foreign policy was not to get entangled in France’s alliance system in Eastern Europe, designed to threaten a resurgent Germany with war on two fronts. However, the French coalition government led by Édouard Daladier was itself bitterly split over Czechoslovakia, with one group willing to honor France’s obligations, another favoring peace at almost any price, and Daladier shifting uneasily between them. At root, a weakened and divided France would not go to war without Britain: for much of the Czech crisis, Paris therefore followed London—its "English governess," in the words of one historian. And London, in essence, meant Neville Chamberlain, aged sixty-eight, who had succeeded Stanley Baldwin as prime minister in May 1937."

"[A]t the time praise was showered on Chamberlain for brokering the deal. On his return from Locarno, he received a special welcome at Victoria Station and, in further similarity to Disraeli in 1878, was immediately made a Knight of the Garter. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin praised him for resolving an issue that had "so far defied the efforts of every statesman since the war." One of Baldwin’s predecessors, Lord Arthur Balfour, said that Chamberlain’s name would be "indissolubly associated” with this probable "turning point in civilisation." A few months later Chamberlain was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. For a politician who had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, "Radical Joe," it was an intoxicating apotheosis. “I am astonished and a little frightened by the completeness of my success and by its immediate recognition everywhere,” Chamberlain told his sister. On October 22, 1925, he dined alone with his younger half-brother Neville, who noted in his diary that Austen "talked almost without stopping from 8 till 11.00 on Locarno. Very naturally, perhaps, the rest of the world does not exist for him...Looking back he felt that no mistake had been made from beginning to end." Neville found it hard to conceal his envy at Austen’s success. Nor, as we shall see, did he forget it."

"After Westphalia brought peace to Europe, the second half of the seventeenth century saw a further spread of resident ambassadors, with Louis XIV’s France leading the way, and French replaced Latin as the lingua franca. There was, however, still scope for summitry, for instance during Peter the Great’s tour of Western Europe in 1697–8. His meetings with William III of England helped bring Russia belatedly into the European diplomatic orbit. In due course, the czar created a "Diplomatic Chancellery" and a network of foreign embassies on the European model."

"In the post-Roman West personal diplomacy was more normal, for instance when family members were vying to divide up a kingdom, as portrayed dramatically in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear. A notable example was the series of summits in Carolingian France after the death of Louis the Pious, particularly those at Verdun in 843 and Meersen in 870. The outlines of these territorial settlements were laboriously thrashed out months in advance by commissioners who surveyed the terrain and gathered data. But plenty of scope still remained for face-to-face haggling by the principals—their in-person meetings guaranteed the agreements by an exchange of oaths and sometimes of hostages. On other occasions, summits concluded carefully prepared peace agreements, as when Frederick Barbarossa and Pope Alexander III met in Venice in 1177. This conference took place on neutral territory; others, as with late Roman practice, were conducted in the borderlands. In either case, the location was chosen to ensure the status and/or security of each ruler."

"Defeat goes deeper into the human soul than victory. To be in someone else’s power is a conscious experience which induces doubts about the ordering of the universe, while those who have power can forget it, or can assume that it is part of the natural order of things and invent or adopt ideas which justify their possession of it."

"In the seventh century the Arabs created a new world into which other peoples were drawn. In the nineteenth and twentieth, they were themselves drawn into a new world created in western Europe. This of course is too simple a way of describing a very complicated process, and the explanations of it can be too simple too."

"If God is merciful and just, do you think it would be the will of God that you should have no rights, that you should be beaten and brutalized and have no opportunity to study?"

"In an account that both travels over explored territory and covers new ground, Charles Rosenberg provides a vivid and complex history of a key institution. Rosenberg divides The Care of Strangers into two periods: the pre-Civil War era, before the advent of modern medicine, and from the war to the 1920s, by which time the had assumed modern form. The underlying theme of the book is that hospitals are a product of the interaction of and physicians. Hospitals were dominated by reformers as long as medical science was weak. But with its rise and the subsequent power of physicians, reformers and their social welfare goals faded."

"Even the most optimistic advocate of innovation in medicine cannot ignore ever-increasing , costs associated in some measure with that we so much admire. And, as we are equally well aware, access to clinical services is far from universal or equitable. As I write this introduction, more than forty million Americans lack and medical expenses remain a major cause of bankruptcy. Still another paradox complicates the relationship between society and medicine. Though expectations of therapeutic efficacy have never been more euphoric and patients appear to trust their own physicians, respect for the medical profession has declined ... The is trusted even less."

"Physicians and since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush have criticized the peculiar tensions of American life. The speculative pathologies which explain precisely how these tensions injured the mind and body have changed in form since the days of Rush, but the ambivalent attitudes which they express toward American life have not. Yet neither Benjamin Rush nor his successors later in the century—, , and , among others—were willing, warn as they might of the psychic perils of American life, to exchange its liberties for the placid tyranny of the Russian or Turkish empires (or, most Americans felt, their Protestantism for the formalistic reassurances of Catholicism)."

"was the classic epidemic disease of the nineteenth century, as had been of the . When cholera first appeared in the United States in 1832, and smallpox, the great epidemic diseases of the previous two centuries, were no longer truly national problems. Yellow fever had disappeared from the , and had deprived smallpox of much of it menace. Cholera, on the other hand, appeared in almost every part of the country in the course of the century. ... Before 1817, there had probably never been a cholera epidemic outside the ; during the nineteenth century, it spread through almost the entire world ..."

"Just as s and s assumed that their research illuminated the glory of God in His works, so did most nineteenth-century American physicians assume that there could be no conflict between their findings and the truths of morality. The human organism was a thing both material and divine, and offenses both physical and moral were necessarily punished with disease. Drinking, overeating, sexual excess, all carried with them inevitable retribution, not because the Lord deigned to intercede directly in human affairs, but because He had created man's body so that infringing on God's moral law meant disobeying the laws of . Moralism thus drew upon the prestige of science, while medicine was pleased that its findings supported the dictates of morality."

"Far into the nineteenth century, Washington remained a small, rather provincial city. Life was seasonal. Oppressed by heat and malaria during the summer, the capital did not awake to its foreshortened and unnaturally frenetic life until fall and the convening of Congress."

"Medicine has always had its s, but until recently it was a history written by and for practitioners. Until the early nineteenth century, in fact, history and practice could hardly be distinguished. Galen and Hippocrates could be and were used to bolster arguments about the nature of fever or the logic of a particular therapeutic choice. A learned physician read Latin and , not simply to mystify the laity but to work with those master texts that still figured meaningfully in his intellectual life. By the late nineteenth century, of course, the writings of and were no longer alive in the thought and practice of even educated practitioners. History had become quite clearly history — something in the past. This is not to suggest that interest in the medicine of previous eras disappeared. It remained was to become gradually — if even today incompletely — an academic field. But the history of medicine was still populated almost entirely by scholars trained in medical schools, the great majority of whom made their living as physicians."

"... and Hugh Hodge, Philadelphia's leading teachers of in the 1840s and 1850s were vociferous in rejecting the suggestion that might be contagious, indeed often spread by the obstetrician himself ... The intensity of their response suggests that something more than mere intellectual difference was involved; one of the roots of their hostility to a contagionist point of view lay in the threat it implied for the physician's status, especially in relation to female patients."

"Perry Miller died fifty years ago today at age fifty-eight. After his death, letters of appreciation from friends and former students flooded the desk where Elizabeth Miller was working to complete her husband’s The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War. In their letters, students expressed gratitude, friends offered Elizabeth their support, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. confessed that Miller’s death, coming on the heels of , had left him in a deep depression. “Perry, as you well know,” wrote Schlesinger, “was one of the first influences in my life.” “He was a superb teacher,” Schlesinger recalled. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a frequent correspondent of Miller’s and a careful reader of all Miller’s books, published an obituary for his friend in the '."

"deserves credit for his courageous advocacy of the of Ohio, probably more than for his contributions to literature: his trade monthly, published from 1854 t0 1861, Cozzens' Wine Press, is a neglected classic which provides a charming insight into the amenities of the table in a society which devoted considerable care to that department."

"Later practitioners improved upon Mitchell and Stoughton only by extending the list of sins, by going into greater detail. Year by year the stock enumeration grew, and once a new sin was added to the series it kept its place in subsequent editions."