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Where Does Common Sense Come From? 'A Modest Proposal' and the Inoculation Controversy
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Where Does Common Sense Come From? 'A Modest Proposal' and the Inoculation Controversy
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Journal Article
Where Does Common Sense Come From? 'A Modest Proposal' and the Inoculation Controversy
2024
Overview
Many a clinical trial boasts results with statistical, albeit not clinical, significance.1 For the hater of statistics Swift's \"A Modest Proposal\" is a locus classicus. \"4 That doctrine, in turn, plays out in the maximally provocative writings of Swift's contemporary and fellow satirist Bernard Mandeville, who was prepared to argue in all candor that \"In a free nation where slaves are not allowed of, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor,\" from which it follows that the children of the poor must be kept ignorant and put to work as early as possible for the public good.5 Only so, argues Mandeville, can England \"out-sell our neighbours and at the same time increase our number,\" objectives dear to mercantilism. According to an axiom of mercantilism, people are the riches of a nation; and if this is so, then the untold grief and loss caused by a disease that depresses the population itself—such as smallpox—also represents an injury to the state. The number of the dead would be reduced seven parts in eight; and consequently, 2000 persons that are yearly cut off within the bills of mortality alone, and those generally in the beginning or prime of life, might be preserved to their king and country.11 While Jurin somewhat rhetorically invokes the mercantilist principle that the individual subserves \"king and country,\" he was anything but a mad calculator swollen with delusions of grandeur like the narrator of \"A Modest Proposal.\"
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Subject
