This paper introduces a collection of essays exploring different aspects of the relationship between medical knowledge and administration in the Habsburg Monarchy. The collection brings together a range of perspectives upon the confrontation between programmes for centralised medical bureaucracy emanating from Vienna, and their implementation in a variety of different cultural, linguistic, social and practical circumstances. Such confrontations raise issues about the nature and limits of enlightened universalism, the relationship between knowledge and government in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and (...) the similarities between the processes of centralisation and the issues addressed by historians of empire. The case of Gerard van Swieten, Catholic Dutch medical practitioner appointed as the chief physician to the Habsburg Imperial family, is used to illustrate some of the main issues involved. (shrink)

In this article, presented as the Second Annual Thesis Eleven Centre Lecture in 2003, Bernard Smith discusses the practice of writing art history in, and about, Australia and Europe. Smith defends periodization, and argues for the necessity of henceforth viewing what is typically called modernism as what he calls the formalesque. Further discussion includes problems of classification, the role of theory, and the place of Aboriginal art in white art history. The article thus surveys the condition of art history in (...) Australia, its emergence and consolidation as a discipline, and its present situation as part of contemporary world culture. (shrink)

European Vision and the South Pacific, first published in 1960, is the most acclaimed of all Bernard Smith’s many texts on art history and cultural theory. In conjunction with its 1992 companion-piece, Imagining the Pacific, and supported by collations of art and cartography from Cook’s and other voyages, this work also established his reputation as a major presence in Pacific-centred research. Likewise, the ongoing influence of European Vision and the South Pacific has seen Smith claimed as a foundational figure in (...) post-colonial scholarship, as one who ‘anticipated’ aspects of Edward Said’s late-1970s analysis of orientalism. But while there are important parallels and overlaps in the thinking of this pair, their differences and divergences are at least as significant. Above all, Smith’s Pacific-centred writings need to be understood as the unique intellectual achievements they undeniably are. (shrink)