Wallflower
“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
22 October 2023
Whiggism, or whig history, is a form of history which always understood the present as a nearly utopian ideal and ‘where we should be’. It is usually, though not always, applied to British history. For instance, whig history would understand the history of medicine, say vaccinations, as a journey from when Edward Jenner first administered James Phillips with a crudely put-together vaccination he’d knocked together from a cowpox patient down the road. I don’t need to check — but I would make a very well-educated guess that history textbooks in primary, secondary and even sixth forms in the UK do not mention how Edward Jenner wasn’t the one who first figured out that cowpox, a bovine virus, could probably protect humans from smallpox. And even if they do, they will almost certainly not mention how vaccination against smallpox, in the exact way that Edward Jenner would carry out half a century later, had been observed in Turkey in 1721. It would probably not mention, in any detail, the failed attempts at inoculation, failed theories, alternative ways of treating smallpox which worked, or other…
