The Power of Diplomacy and the Importance of Population

No single power emerged from the wars of the first half of the eighteenth century clearly superior to the others, and the Peace of Utrecht explicitly declared that maintaining a balance of power was crucial to keeping peace in Europe. Diplomacy helped preserve that balance, and to meet the new demands placed on it, the diplomatic service, like the military and financial bureaucracies before it, had to develop regular procedures. The French set a pattern that the other European states soon imitated. By 1685, France had embassies in all the important capitals. Nobles of ancient families served as ambassadors to Rome, Madrid, Vienna, and London, whereas royal officials were chosen for Switzerland, the Dutch Republic, and Venice. The ambassador selected and paid for his own staff, which might be as large as eighty people. The diplomatic system ensured a continuation of the principles of the Peace of Westphalia (1648); in the midst of every crisis and war, the great powers would convene and hammer out a written agreement detailing the requirements for peace.

Adroit diplomacy could smooth the road toward peace, but success in war still depended on sheer numbers—of men and of muskets. Because each state’s strength depended largely on the size of its army, the growth and health of the population increasingly entered into government calculations. William Petty’s Political Arithmetick (1690) offered statistical estimates of human capital—that is, of population and wages—to determine Britain’s national wealth. Government officials devoted increased effort to the statistical estimation of total population and rates of births, deaths, and marriages.

Physicians used the new population statistics to explain the environmental causes of disease, another new preoccupation in this period. Petty, trained as a physician himself, devised a quantitative scale that distinguished healthy from unhealthy places largely on the basis of air quality, an early precursor of modern environmental studies. Cities were the unhealthiest places because garbage and excrement (animal and human) accumulated where people lived densely packed together. The Irish writer Jonathan Swift described what happened in London after a big rainstorm: “Filths of all hues and colors . . . sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts and blood . . . dead cats and turniptops come tumbling down the flood.” Reacting to newly collected data on climate, disease, and population, local governments undertook such measures as draining low-lying areas, burying refuse, and cleaning wells.

Not all changes came from direct government intervention. Hospitals, founded originally as charities concerned foremost with the moral worthiness of the poor, gradually evolved into medical institutions that defined patients by their diseases. Physicians began to rely on postmortem dissections in the hospital to gain better knowledge, a practice most patients’ families resented. Press reports of body snatching and grave robbing by surgeons and their apprentices outraged the public well into the 1800s.

Despite the change in hospitals, a medical profession with nationwide organizations and licensing had not yet emerged, and no clear line separated trained physicians from quacks. Patients in a hospital were as likely to catch a deadly disease as to be cured there. Antiseptics were virtually unknown. Because doctors believed that most insanity was caused by disorders in the system of bodily “humors,” their prescribed treatments included blood transfusions; ingestion of bitter substances such as coffee, quinine, and soap; immersion in water; various forms of exercise; and burning or cauterizing the body to allow “black vapors” to escape.

Hardly any infectious diseases could be cured, though inoculation against smallpox spread from the Middle East to Europe in the early eighteenth century, thanks largely to the efforts of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762). Wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Montagu witnessed firsthand the Turkish use of inoculation. When a new smallpox epidemic threatened England in 1721, she called on her physician to inoculate her daughter. Inoculation against smallpox spread more widely only after 1796, when the English physician Edward Jenner developed a serum based on cowpox, a milder disease.

Public bathhouses had disappeared from cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because they seemed to be a source of disorderly behavior and epidemic illness. In the eighteenth century, even private bathing came into disfavor because people feared the effects of contact with water. Bathing was hazardous, physicians insisted, because it opened the body to disease. The upper classes associated cleanliness not with baths but with frequently changed linens, powdered hair, and perfume, which was thought to strengthen the body and refresh the brain by counteracting corrupt and foul air.