Anecdotal Evidence: Science and Storytelling in the Global Eighteenth Century

什么是轶事证据？在漫长的18世纪中，它与全球相互联系的巨大变化有什么关系？它讲述了什么样的科学故事？在英国的启蒙谈话文化时代，轶事作为一种文学形式崭露头角。虽然17世纪的用法表明轶事传达了秘密或未发表的知识，但在19世纪的文学和历史轶事汇编中充满了收集和文学蜉蝣的文化之前，18世纪的重点是关于引人注目的事件的轶事。在科学传播中，轶事提供了不同于其他实验和观察叙述的非正式证据。这个项目展示了英国旅行、贸易和帝国的全球线路如何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，促进了对轶事交流的新重视。该研究采用文学分析来检验轶事证据的文本结构和全球影响。18世纪的咖啡馆和沙龙活跃了轶事证据的传播。但是，这个项目并没有把重点放在这样的精英空间上，而是展示了一种轶事性质的信息交流，使知识从边缘化的个人和群体中传播开来。当某些想法、经历或实验被框定为“轶事”时，其目的往往是将它们排除在主流思想之外。1788年，奴隶主斯蒂芬·富勒（Stephen Fuller）作为牙买加医学和植物学实践的二手证据，向英国政府提交了一份名为“波波之国的女人”的轶事。它讲述了一个种植园主发现许多被奴役的人突然死于一种神秘的传染病。一位非洲妇女被认定用邪恶的力量击倒了他们，她的房子里堆满了“她的贸易工具，包括破布、羽毛、猫的骨头、大量的泥土、土球或粘土，以及成千上万的其他物品”。她把自己的植物学知识视为“迷信”，她的小屋里的东西被判焚烧，这种神秘的疾病立即被治愈了。这个轶事的生命并没有结束于它被种植园当局称为非洲-加勒比人的“虚假”知识的证据。这个故事（以及相关轶事的联系）随后出现在几十部其他作品中。故事的结构经常发生变化，有时将口头传播作为二手知识，有时则以正式报告文学的形式出现。在一些版本中，这则轶事被逐字逐句地誊写在不同的语境中。虽然第一个版本的目的是提升欧洲对非洲-加勒比地区的认识，但后来的一些欧洲论文对非洲自然知识的准确性表示了极大的尊重。这个轶事在牙买加和英国之间来回传播的过程中，先是作为国家证词，然后是报纸、自然历史论文和小说，它的持久性和蜕变性揭示了轶事可能采取的特定地理和文本路线。我的研究将追踪医学和自然哲学轶事的跨国旅行的其他例子，解决文本弹性和刚性的复杂性，并询问轶事形成，传播和重新校准的方式可以告诉我们跨境文学生产。该项目仔细检查了与边缘化知识相关的档案缺口，研究了被启蒙运动机构排除在外的轶事对思想的意义，同时也揭示了它们对科学文化史和启蒙文学文化理解的重要性。

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 While seventeenth-century usage suggests anecdotes conveyed secret or unpublished knowledge, the eighteenth century brought an emphasis on anecdotes about striking events, before a culture of collection and literary ephemera filled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.