The Architecture of Isolation 5 - Nearing the Winter Solstice 2023

Edmund Alexander Parkes (1819-1876)

There are some very close answers, but Bilbo has it! I am not sure if by hook or by crook, Bilbo got the correct answer - however, the courier cannot deliver Carl’s signed portrait to Middle Earth, so bad luck. 

The mystery writer is Professor Parkes, who figures prominently in the 15th lecture of the Snow series.

Parkes started life as a contagionist military surgeon in India, turned miasmatist (anticontagionist), and then, towards the end of his life, transitioned to contingent contagionism. However, I am not sure he would recognise the term today.

Parkes was a man of intelligence and vast experience. He was in the Dardanelles with Florence Nightingale and wrote A Manual of Practical Hygiene, from which I have taken the sentences in the Architecture 4 post:

“During the last ten years a great number of works (English, French and German) have been written on the construction of hospitals. This has been especially owing to the celebrated “Notes on Hospitals” published by Miss Nightingale, …