Page - 356 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 8356 Hell conscientiously published the monthly reports up to November 1777, when he broke with the journal. As he explained early in the following year in the Wienerisches Diarium, this was because “the new authors of this journal have chosen a new plan,” namely not to publish anything already available in other Viennese publications. He also announced that the same kinds of re- ports would from then on be published in the Wienerisches Diarium,40 and the first of these indeed followed right upon the heels of the announcement. For their part, the editors of the Realzeitung hastened to clarify that Hell’s reports had “hardly anything attractive” to offer.41 Hell’s justification of his decision may well have been a polite veil over his discomfort with the editorial line of the journal in a broader sense: during the following years—no doubt thanks to the influence of von Born, who appeared among its authors in the same year as Hell, and writer Alois Blumauer (1755–98), who became its editor in 1782—the Realzeitung was taking an ever more radically enlightened turn, with freema- sonry becoming its leading source of inspiration. Before considering the open attack on Hell by von Born a few years later, we should look at the polemics in which the court astronomer was thrown by his ventures into discussing some of the great medical issues of the times. In the 1777 Realzeitung, besides the astronomical reports and a brief essay on anti- dotes against bedbugs, Hell also published an article on the use of sugar as prophylactic medicine against scurvy.42 While in Vardø, Hell had experienced that several local inhabitants, particularly seafarers, suffered from this disease. Its cause, Hell argued, was the consumption of too much smoked meat, but especially the high salt content of the air. He claims to have recalled from his studies that sugar—“a kind of vegetable-based salt”—has the capacity of neu- tralizing the effect of salt, therefore he instructed their cook to salt meals very lightly, but use generous quantities of sugar (with which, thanks to the fact that there was a sugar refinery in Trondheim, they were well equipped). As a result, he and his team could avoid the disease without a single exception. For some- one as proud as Hell was of his credentials as a scientist with scrupulous standards of verification, he took this perhaps too lightly as a proof of the pre- ventive powers of sugar, yet he even risked a hint that it might be suitable for healing patients already suffering from scurvy, and closed with a passing refer- ence to the possibility of similar benefits from the consumption of horseradish 40 WD, no. 3. (January 10, 1778): 10. 41 Realzeitung, no. 3 (January 20, 1778): 49. 42 For the discussion of bedbugs, see Realzeitung, no. 7 (May 13, 1777): 107–11; on scurvy, Real­ zeitung, no. 8 (February 18, 1777): 122–26.