Anecdotal Evidence: Science and Storytelling in the Global Eighteenth Century

What is anecdotal evidence, how does it relate to the dramatic changes in global interconnectedness over the course of the long eighteenth century, and what kinds of scientific stories does it tell? The anecdote rose to prominence as a literary form in the era of Enlightenment conversation culture in Britain. While seventeenth-century usage suggests anecdotes conveyed secret or unpublished knowledge, the eighteenth century brought an emphasis on anecdotes about striking events, before a culture of collection and literary ephemera filled nineteenth-century compilations of literary and historical anecdotes. In scientific communication, anecdotes offer informal evidence that differs from other experimental and observational narratives. This project shows how global circuits of British travel, trade and empire contributed to a new emphasis on anecdotal exchange in a period when informal evidence relating to medicine and natural philosophy was rapidly increasing in transnational circulation. The research engages literary analysis to examine the textual structures and global influences of anecdotal evidence.

The circulation of anecdotal evidence was enlivened by eighteenth-century coffee-houses and salons. But rather than focus on such elite spaces, this project will show that information exchanges of an anecdotal nature enabled knowledge to spread from marginalized individuals and groups. When certain kinds of ideas, experiences or experiments were framed as 'anecdotal', the intention was often to proscribe them from mainstream thought. The anecdote known as 'The Woman of the Popo Country' first appeared on record when it was submitted to the British Government in 1788 by slave-owner Stephen Fuller as second-hand evidence relating to medical and botanical practices in Jamaica. It tells the story of a planter discovering the sudden deaths of a great many enslaved people from a mysterious contagion. An African woman is identified as having struck them down using nefarious powers, and her house is found to be filled with the 'implements of her Trade, consisting of Rags, Feathers, bones of Cats, a prodigious Quantity of dirt, Balls of Earth or Clay, and a thousand other articles'. Dismissing her botanical knowledge as 'superstition', the contents of her hut are condemned to burn, and the mysterious disease instantly cured.

The life of this anecdote did not end in its use as evidence for what plantation authorities called the 'false' knowledge of African-Caribbean peoples. This story (and the nexus of related anecdotes) subsequently appeared in dozens of other works. The story's structure often changed, sometimes foregrounding its oral transmission as second-hand knowledge, elsewhere taking on the guise of formal reportage. In some versions, the anecdote was transcribed verbatim in a different context. While the first version is intended to elevate European knowledge over African-Caribbean, some later European treatises couched the anecdote in great esteem for the accuracy of African natural knowledge.

This anecdote's persistence and metamorphosis as it was transmitted back and forth between Jamaica and Britain, first as state testimony, then in newspapers, natural historical treatises, and fiction, reveal the specific geographical and textual routes anecdotes could take. My research will trace other examples of the transnational travels of medical and natural philosophical anecdotes, addressing the complications of textual elasticity and rigidity and asking what the ways in which anecdotes are formed, transmitted and recalibrated can tell us about cross-border literary production. Scrutinizing the archival gaps that exist in relation to marginalized knowledge, the project examines the significance of anecdotes to ideas that were excluded by Enlightenment institutions while also revealing their importance to the cultural history of science and to the understanding of Enlightenment literary cultures.