Four Eighteenth-century Medical Dissertations under the Presidency of Nils Rosén : Edited and translated, with an introduction and commentary by Urban Örneholm

Abstract: Nils Rosén (von Rosenstein) (1706–73), Professor of medicine at Uppsala University, is less known than his colleague Linnaeus, but has, mainly through his textbook Underrättelser om Barn-Sjukdomar (1st monograph ed. 1764), had an enormous influence on the care of children throughout Europe. In this thesis, four Latin dissertations, put forth under the presidency of Nils Rosén, are edited, with translation, commentary, and introduction. These dissertations quite clearly represent the latest medical knowledge of the mid 18th century, and recent theories are propounded, discussed, and examined against practical and empirical knowledge; the texts are thus representative examples of the kind of academic dissertations that communicated and discussed relevant factual matter as opposed to those that just constituted an amount of text, suitable for elaborating on during the disputational ceremony. In my introduction, I mainly concentrate on medical and pharmacological technical terminology, but more general aspects on scholarly and scientific Neo-Latin are also dealt with. The dissertations edited are De variolis praecavendis (1751), De variolis curandis (1754), both treating smallpox; De epilepsia infantili (1754), on children’s epilepsy, and De morbis infantum (1752), dealing with the health care of children in genere, and interesting as an early Latin version of parts of Underrättelser.