CEMH Digital Talk: Margaret DeLacy (Independent Scholar)

Title: “The Early Eighteenth-Century Apocalypse, Some Origins, Confluences, and Questions”

Abstract: In the early eighteenth century, life was precarious. The closing years of the Little Ice Age brought unpredictable famines. Dynasties failed and empires were transformed. Global trade and imperial wars spread plague and other diseases across Europe as smallpox and measles devastated American communities. Yet simultaneously, a series of fortuitous events fostered a few personal connections that spanned the western world from Istanbul to America and would transform health and medicine forever. In this session, we will sample some of these encounters, both large and small, and interrogate their causes and outcomes.

Bio: Margaret DeLacy is the author of several articles and three books including The Germ of An Idea: Contagionism, Religion, and Society in Britain, 1660-1730,  and Contagionism Catches On: Medical Ideology in Britain, 1730-1800.  She received her Ph.D. in English History from Princeton University.  She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is the President of the Northwest Independent Scholars Association.

Part of the Panic and Plague in 1720 and 2020 Lecture Series