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Physical Inoculation and Moral Invulnerability: Physical Inoculation and Moral Invulnerability: Dipping Emile into the (French) Styx Presented at the 1996 AESA Convention
authority If the prestige of the authority is this important, then perhaps the institutional prestige of Yale University legitimized the Milgram experiment commands.
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Physical Inoculation and Moral Invulnerability:
Dipping Emile into the (French) Styx
Presented at the
1996 AESA Convention
Montreal
Gerald Pillsbury
Dept. of Education
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, MI 49008
616-387-2979
Fax: 616-387-2882
email: Pillsbury@WMICH.edu
The frontispiece of Emile shows Thetis dipping the infant Achilles into the Styx which, if you recall the myth, rendered him invulnerable to virtually all attack. The placement of the illustration suggests that invulnerability plays a central role in the education he provides Emile. Indeed in Book V (443), Rousseau tells Emile that whereas Thetis dipped Achilles' body in the Styx, he has attempted to do the same for his soul.
That the invulnerability Achilles enjoyed protected his physical body points to an suggestive conjunction of historical events. The 18th century was a time of intense interest in the processes of inoculation and vaccination against disease. While the first decisive steps towards modern preventative medicine were certainly still a ways off when Rousseau wrote Emile in 1762, a primitive form of inoculation, however, had come to England and the continent of Europe from the East in the early 1700s and was gaining notoriety. In fact, Lady Mary Wortley Montague reported the procedure in 1718 and had herself and her children inoculated. Within a few years, most of the royal family in England was inoculated.
Along with the frontispiece, the interest in vaccination at the time Rousseau wrote Emile raises a number of questions. What, if any, connection can we draw between the moral education...
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