Anecdotal Evidence: Science and Storytelling in the Global Eighteenth Century

什么是轶事证据，它与漫长的18世纪期间全球互联互通的戏剧性变化有什么关系，它讲述了什么样的科学故事？在英国启蒙对话文化时代，这则轶事作为一种文学形式声名鹊起。虽然17世纪的用法表明轶事传达了秘密或未出版的知识，但18世纪的用法侧重于关于引人注目的事件的轶事，在19世纪的文学和历史轶事汇编充满收藏和文学短暂的文化之前。在科学交流中，轶事提供了不同于其他实验和观察叙事的非正式证据。这个项目展示了在一个与医学和自然哲学有关的非正式证据在跨国流通中迅速增加的时期，英国旅行、贸易和帝国的全球巡回如何促进了对轶事交流的新重视。这项研究采用文学分析的方法来考察轶事证据的文本结构和全球影响。18世纪的咖啡馆和沙龙使轶事证据的流通变得活跃起来。但是，这个项目不是专注于这样的精英空间，而是将表明，轶事性质的信息交流使知识能够从被边缘化的个人和群体传播。当某些想法、经历或实验被框定为“轶事”时，其意图往往是禁止它们进入主流思想。1788年，奴隶主斯蒂芬·富勒向英国政府提交了这则被称为“波波国家的女人”的轶事，作为牙买加医疗和植物学实践的二手证据，这一轶事首次出现在记录中。它讲述了一个种植者发现许多被奴役的人突然死于一种神秘的传染病的故事。一名非洲妇女被发现使用邪恶的力量击倒了他们，她的房子里装满了她的手艺工具，包括碎屑、羽毛、猫骨、大量的泥土、泥球或粘土，以及一千种其他物品。她将自己的植物学知识斥为迷信，她的小屋里的东西注定要被烧毁，这种神秘的疾病很快就被治愈了。这段轶事的生命并没有被用来证明种植园当局所说的非洲裔加勒比海人的“虚假”知识。这个故事(以及相关轶事的联系)随后出现在数十部其他作品中。故事的结构经常发生变化，有时会突出其口头传播的二手知识，而在其他地方则披着正式报告文学的外衣。在一些版本中，这则轶事是在不同的背景下逐字转录的。虽然第一个版本的目的是提升欧洲的知识超过非洲加勒比地区，一些后来的欧洲论文提出了非常尊重非洲自然知识的准确性。这件轶事的持久性和变形，因为它是在牙买加和英国之间来回传输，首先作为国家证词，然后在报纸，自然历史论文，和小说，揭示了具体的地理和文字路线轶事可以采取。我的研究将追溯医学和自然哲学轶事跨国旅行的其他例子，解决文本弹性和僵化的复杂性，并询问轶事的形成、传播和重新校正的方式可以告诉我们什么关于跨境文学生产。该项目仔细研究了与边缘化知识有关的档案空白，考察了轶事对被启蒙机构排除在外的思想的意义，同时也揭示了它们对科学文化史和对启蒙文学文化的理解的重要性。

What is anecdotal evidence, how does it relate to the dramatic changes in global interconnectedness over the course of the long eighteenth century, and what kinds of scientific stories does it tell? The anecdote rose to prominence as a literary form in the era of Enlightenment conversation culture in Britain. While seventeenth-century usage suggests anecdotes conveyed secret or unpublished knowledge, the eighteenth century brought an emphasis on anecdotes about striking events, before a culture of collection and literary ephemera filled nineteenth-century compilations of literary and historical anecdotes. In scientific communication, anecdotes offer informal evidence that differs from other experimental and observational narratives. This project shows how global circuits of British travel, trade and empire contributed to a new emphasis on anecdotal exchange in a period when informal evidence relating to medicine and natural philosophy was rapidly increasing in transnational circulation. The research engages literary analysis to examine the textual structures and global influences of anecdotal evidence. The circulation of anecdotal evidence was enlivened by eighteenth-century coffee-houses and salons. But rather than focus on such elite spaces, this project will show that information exchanges of an anecdotal nature enabled knowledge to spread from marginalized individuals and groups. When certain kinds of ideas, experiences or experiments were framed as 'anecdotal', the intention was often to proscribe them from mainstream thought. The anecdote known as 'The Woman of the Popo Country' first appeared on record when it was submitted to the British Government in 1788 by slave-owner Stephen Fuller as second-hand evidence relating to medical and botanical practices in Jamaica. It tells the story of a planter discovering the sudden deaths of a great many enslaved people from a mysterious contagion. An African woman is identified as having struck them down using nefarious powers, and her house is found to be filled with the 'implements of her Trade, consisting of Rags, Feathers, bones of Cats, a prodigious Quantity of dirt, Balls of Earth or Clay, and a thousand other articles'. Dismissing her botanical knowledge as 'superstition', the contents of her hut are condemned to burn, and the mysterious disease instantly cured.The life of this anecdote did not end in its use as evidence for what plantation authorities called the 'false' knowledge of African-Caribbean peoples. This story (and the nexus of related anecdotes) subsequently appeared in dozens of other works. The story's structure often changed, sometimes foregrounding its oral transmission as second-hand knowledge, elsewhere taking on the guise of formal reportage. In some versions, the anecdote was transcribed verbatim in a different context. While the first version is intended to elevate European knowledge over African-Caribbean, some later European treatises couched the anecdote in great esteem for the accuracy of African natural knowledge.This anecdote's persistence and metamorphosis as it was transmitted back and forth between Jamaica and Britain, first as state testimony, then in newspapers, natural historical treatises, and fiction, reveal the specific geographical and textual routes anecdotes could take. My research will trace other examples of the transnational travels of medical and natural philosophical anecdotes, addressing the complications of textual elasticity and rigidity and asking what the ways in which anecdotes are formed, transmitted and recalibrated can tell us about cross-border literary production. Scrutinizing the archival gaps that exist in relation to marginalized knowledge, the project examines the significance of anecdotes to ideas that were excluded by Enlightenment institutions while also revealing their importance to the cultural history of science and to the understanding of Enlightenment literary cultures.