Academic literature on the topic 'John Wollaston'

This chapter studies a series of portraits of young women dressed for the masquerade, completed by English artist John Wollaston in Charleston, South Carolina. Although Wollaston painted the sitters in historic costume appropriate for a public masked ball, no masquerades were held in the British North American colonies. Instead, these fictional portrayals allowed colonial women to vicariously participate in the sexually riotous assemblies. For male colonists, the paintings underlined the need to contain women’s sexuality. In a colonial environment, many feared women’s proximity to native Americans would spur savage behaviors and compromise civil society. Most of the portraits feature young women about to be married, connecting their masked visages with the metaphor of a woman in courtship who masked her affections to attain the best husband. Wollaston’s adoption of mask iconography also resonates with the tumultuous 1760s, marked by the growing political crisis between Great Britain and her American colonies, when colonists questioned the nature of their identity as imperial subjects and feared British duplicity.

Chapter 2 focuses on mid-century Philadelphia’s burgeoning art community through the figure of travelling English portrait painter John Wollaston, who visited the city in 1752 and 1758/9. Wollaston’s presence encouraged the young student Francis Hopkinson to write a poem about the artist in the new periodical the American Magazine. By tracing the aesthetic responses that Hopkinson and the fellow students in his circle (including Benjamin West) had to Wollaston’s portraits the chapter charts Philadelphians’ engagement with the aesthetic debates raging in London over the role of the artist and the power of the portrait to civilize. Hopkinson embraced the new model of connoisseurship being popularized in the British art capital of London but recast it to argue that the portrait could civilize the sitter. Reading Wollaston’s portraits through the model of physiognomy reveals how viewers understood his paintings to improve sitters’ civility and how his paintings forged social connections between sitters.

Chapter 2 traces the intellectual genealogy of the young Benjamin Franklin during a time when he was the most free-spirited and least restrained by social conventions. At age seventeen, having learnt the printing trade, he left Boston. For almost three years, while attempting to find regular work as a printer first in Philadelphia and then London, Franklin continued to read widely and think deep thoughts about his place in the universe. This was the period when he espoused deism and wrote (and published) a short treatise on predestination and determinism (subsequently destroyed) as well as A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity. The chapter discusses the influence on Franklin of the Earl of Shaftesbury, John Locke, and William Wollaston. In 1726, Franklin produced Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion.

The optic chiasm has been a topic of much interest since the first century A.D., when Galen described the union of the optic nerves as a “shape…very much like the letter chi.” In the centuries that followed, many scientists and physicians studied the structural aspects of the optic chiasm, starting with Isaac Newton, who in 1706 first explained that the partial decussation of the optic nerve fibers was necessary for binocular vision. Abraham Vater and J.C. Heinicke provided the first clinical evidence of hemidecussation in 1723, when they described cases of transient “halved vision” (homonymous hemianopia), presumably of migrainous origin, and concluded that the optic nerves decussate before uniting into the optic tracts because “without decussation of fibers in these nerves divided vision can in no way be explained.” The first diagram of decussating fibers was published in 1750 by “Chevalier” John Taylor, an itinerant eye surgeon, notorious for his charlatan ways and a practice “deeply tainted with the dishonest arts of the quack.” In 1824, a century after Vater and Heinicke’s work on hemidecussation, William Wollaston reported experiencing two episodes of half vision in each eye. He concluded that this necessitated hemidecussation of the optic nerves at the chiasm. The growing body of knowledge of chiasmal anatomy and visual fields culminated in the work of Harvey Cushing on the diagnostic recognition and surgical management of pituitary tumors. In December 1901, a 16-year-old girl was referred to Cushing by Sir William Osler. She had headaches and loss of vision and was short, obese, and sexually underdeveloped, appearing as a child of 12. Cushing missed the possible connection of the patient’s symptoms and appearance to the chiasm and the pituitary. After the young girl developed papilledema, Cushing operated first to decompress one cerebral hemisphere and then the other. When both operations failed to restore her vision, he operated a third time on the cerebellum, but the patient died several days later. At autopsy, a large pituitary cyst was discovered.