History of science Books
Duke University Press Avian Reservoirs
Book SynopsisAfter experiencing the SARS outbreak in 2003, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan all invested in various techniques to mitigate future pandemics involving myriad cross-species interactions between humans and birds. In some locations microbiologists allied with veterinarians and birdwatchers to follow the mutations of flu viruses in birds and humans and create preparedness strategies, while in others, public health officials worked toward preventing pandemics by killing thousands of birds. In Avian Reservoirs Frédéric Keck offers a comparative analysis of these responses, tracing how the anticipation of bird flu pandemics has changed relations between birds and humans in China. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnographic fieldwork, Keck demonstrates that varied strategies dealing with the threat of pandemics—stockpiling vaccines and samples in Taiwan, simulating pandemics in Singapore, and monitoring viruses and disease vectors in Hong Kong—reflect Trade Review“In this ethnography of the prevention of bird flu pandemics in Asia, Frédéric Keck dazzlingly interweaves perspectives from the anthropology of sciences and institutions, an account of the modernization of methods of biopower, and a fine-grained analysis of relations between endangered humans and nonhumans in order to show how common values evolve out of their mutual vulnerabilities. A crucial contribution to the reformulation of political rules for the coexistence between different forms of life.” -- Philippe Descola, Collège de France“This is a delicious book, fun to read and full of bright sparks of insight. Frédéric Keck compares microbiologists to hunters; he mixes and matches his ontologies in relation to particular scientific practices. The exuberance of comparison makes the experiment work. I find it stimulating and good to think with.” -- Anna Tsing, coeditor of * Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene *"This thought-provoking and brilliant book is no doubt timely. Avian Reservoirs inspires us to re-examine our relations with animals and techniques of dealing with zoonotic disease." -- Justin Lau * LSE Review of Books *"The message of [Avian Reservoirs] is both timely and time-honored. The birds and their microbes, like the omens of classical literature, bear witness to a realm of higher truths. We would do well to heed our augurs." -- Priscilla Wald * Public Books *“Ultimately Keck’s work offers a global view of China and the region, and if it remains less invested in the concerns of area studies specialists, it fits nicely with much of contemporary medical anthropology, especially recent work on biology, biosciences, and even environmental history…. Theoretically sophisticated, and holding ethnographical ambitions, Avian Reservoirs offers much to consider with the questions it poses, actively seeking to ‘decenter humans by showing their dependence on other species.’” -- John P. DiMoia * Asian Ethnology *“Avian Reservoirs is a fascinating and timely ethnography on bird flu prevention in East Asia. Frédéric Keck has taken a unique approach to the field of global health that is rich with theoretical insights and fresh methods.” -- Eric I. Karchmer * Journal of Asian Studies *“Avian Reservoirs offers a well-historicized ethnography of key systems of global infectious disease research, surveillance, and prevention.... Keck’s book is essential for scholars interested in pandemic preparedness.” -- Stephen Molldrem * New Genetics and Society *“Frédéric Keck’s illuminating study . . . could not be more timely at a time when the world is in the throes of Covid-19. . . . [Avian Reservoirs] forces us to reflect on the disequilibrium that has created our present crisis.” -- Thomas Abraham * Journal of Anthropological Research *"Avian Reservoirs is a highly creative and unorthodox work, richly informed by interdisciplinary concepts that are folded into the text with care and intellectual fidelity. . . . Avian Reservoirs is a thought-provoking read—imposing order and orientation over disparate, highly charged, and locally varying projects to manage the entanglements between humans, animals, and emerging pathogens." -- Martha Lincoln * China Perspectives *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I. Animal Diseases 1. Culling, Vaccinating, and Monitoring Contagious Animals 11 2. Biosecurity Concerns and the Surveillance of Zoonoses 29 3. Global Health and the Ecologies of Conservation 44 Part II. Techniques of Preparedness 4. Sentinels and Early Warning Signals 69 5. Simulations and Reverse Scenarios 108 6. Stockpiling and Storage 139 Conclusion 173 Notes 179 Bibliography 211 Index 237
£25.19
Duke University Press Cloud Ethics
Book SynopsisLouise Amoore examines how machine learning algorithms are transforming the ethics and politics of contemporary society, proposing what she calls cloud ethics as a way to hold algorithms accountable by engaging with the social and technical conditions under which they emerge and operate.Trade Review“Beautifully written and richly documented, Louise Amoore's Cloud Ethics analyzes the workings of algorithms in contemporary society, from those assessing security risks to self-learning and self-programming neural nets. She draws on her extensive interviews with experts in the field to explore the nuances of algorithmic doubt and certainty. Finally, she calls for a new ethics of doubt in which the individual components of algorithms are scrutinized to open new spaces for critique that can ‘crack open’ the seemingly certain fabulations of algorithmic calculation. Technically stunning and critically informed, this book is required reading for anyone interested in how to resist the current trends toward algorithmic governmentality.” -- N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles“Calling for an embrace of the contingency and doubt that is inherent in the structure and working of algorithms, this important book refuses mythologies of certainty and machinic omnipotence. Framing computation as a partial accounting, Cloud Ethics moves beyond the unproductive binaries of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ to consider algorithms as generative of complex political possibilities.” -- Caren Kaplan, author of * Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above *"Similar to scholars such as N. Katherine Hayles, Amoore engages with a wide range of philosophers and novelists to make sense of the ethicopolitical implications of algorithms. As a result, the book is highly engaging and is densely packed with novel ideas and concepts (e.g., ‘space of play’ and ‘algorithmic author function’) that will undoubtedly take on a life of their own in future research. Given their proliferation in society, there has never been a more apt time to examine the ethicopolitical impact of algorithms, and Louise Amoore’s Cloud Ethics is the book to turn to." -- Ben Jacobsen * Information, Communication & Society *"Amoore . . . has written what I consider to be essential reading for anyone interested in the ethical and political analysis of our digital condition." -- Davide Panagia * Public Books *“Amoore’s text will be of great interest to critical communication scholars, political scientists, and researchers from other disciplines and fields interested in critical algorithm studies. ...Cloud Ethics is a text that will exceed its source, one that will benefit debates and contention within the academic fields it touches on as well as society at large.” -- Catherine Jeffery * International Journal of Communication *“[Cloud Ethics] substantially advances our understanding of the ethical and political considerations necessary for navigating this ever-changing world.... It also subtly offers a methodology for the social sciences to intervene in discussions on the algorithmic, through reading against the grain of technical books and fabulation as a tool of critique.” -- Andrew C. Dwyer * AAG Review of Books *“Cloud Ethics is a demanding, exciting, and timely read. . . . It will travel well across most social sciences and even humanities, and will be of interest to scholars in ethics, politics, government and technology, but also aesthetics, law, and literature.” -- Juan M. del Nido * Anthropos *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments xi Introduction. Politics and Ethics in the Age of Algorithms 1 Part 1. Condensation 1. The Cloud Chambers: Condensed Data and Correlative Reason 29 2. The Learning Machines: Neural Networks and Regimes of Recognition 56 Part 2. Attribution 3. The Uncertain Author: Writing and Attribution 85 4. The Madness of Algorithms: Aberration and Unreasonable Acts 108 Part 3. Ethics 5. The Doubtful Algorithm: Ground Truth and Partial Accounts 133 6. The Unattributable: Strategies for a Cloud Ethics 154 Notes 173 Bibliography 197 Index 212
£72.25
Duke University Press Code
Book SynopsisIn Code Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early accounts of cybernetics and digital media by theorists including Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray. His analysis casts light on how media-practical research forged common epistemic cause in programs that stretched from 1930s interwar computing at MIT and eugenics to the proliferation of seminars and laboratories in 1960s Paris. This mobilization ushered forth new fields of study such as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology while forming enduring intellectual affinities between the humanities and informatics. With Code, Geoghegan offers a new history of French theory and the digital humanities as transcontinental and political endeavors linking interwar colonial ethnography in Trade Review“Straying away from the familiar itineraries of intellectual history, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan invites us to take a path less trodden: a detour that allows the reader to revisit famous milestones in the development of cybernetics and digital media, and to connect them to scholarly debates stemming from fields of study as distant as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology." * The Duke Reader *“Bernard Geoghegan’s Code presents a strong history of how the humanities of the 20th century worked in close connection with communication and information sciences … a rich and insightful analysis.” -- Jussi Parikka * Leonardo Reviews *"Anyone interested in the political and ethical dimensions of cybernetics and contemporary social networking will be fascinated by Geoghegan's rich historical and interpretive account of these important and timely subjects. Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. Students in two-year technical programs." -- J. W. Dauben * Choice *"Geoghegan’s rich and surprising account of the common inheritance shared by information theory and French Theory in the era of liberal technocracy, industrial capitalism, and colonial crisis will change how we think about the nature, risks, and possibilities of data analytics, critical theory, and the digital humanities now and for years to come." -- Carolyn Pedwell * Theory, Culture & Society *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Codification 1 1. Foundations for Informatics: Technocracy, Philanthropy, and Communications Sciences 21 2. Pattern Recognition: Data Capture in Colonies, Clinics, and Suburbs 53 3. Poeticizing Cybernetics: An Informatic Infrastructure for Structural Linguistics 85 4. Theory for Administrators: The Ambivalent Technocracy of Claude Lévi-Strauss 107 5. Learning to Code: Cybernetics and French Theory 133 Conclusion. Coding Today: Toward an Analysis of Cultural Analytics 169 Notes 181 Bibliography 221 Index 245
£70.55
New York University Press Skin Theory
Book SynopsisHonorable Mention, Rachel Carson Prize, given by the Society for the Social Studies of ScienceFinalist, 2023 ASAP Book Award, given by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the PresentStudies the intersections of incarceration, medical science, and race in postwar AmericaIn February 1966, a local newspaper described the medical science program at Holmesburg Prison, Philadelphia, a golden opportunity to conduct widespread medical tests under perfect control conditions. Helmed by Albert M. Kligman, a University of Pennsylvania professor, these tests enrolled hundreds of the prison's predominantly Black population in studies determining the efficacy and safety of a wide variety of substances, from common household products to chemical warfare agents. These experiments at Holmesburg were hardly unique; in the postwar United States, the use of incarcerated test subjects was standard practice among many research institutions and pharmaceutical companies. Skin Theory examines the prisoTrade ReviewCristina Visperas speaks theory to history, overturning decades of documentation that sensationalizes Philadelphia’s infamous Holmesburg Prison and the medical experiments conducted there on the backs of Black subjects. Critical visual carceral studies is brought powerfully to bear on the science studies critique of biomedicine, institutions of state power, and technologies of race, showing us how the crumbling edifice of the prison system is structurally linked to the assault on Black skin inside its walls. * Lisa Cartwright, University of California, San Diego *Skin Theory is a provocative and thoroughly researched work that is essential reading for anyone invested in science and technology studies, critical investigations of race, and the prison abolition movement. Visperas deftly navigates the nuances of theory against infamously racist historical events to produce a book that is at once necessary and timely. * Jeffrey Allen Bennet, Vanderbilt University *Mejia Visperas (Univ. of Southern California) outlines a broader critical reenvisioning of these events, treating them as paradigmatic of the scientific racism inherent in the overall entanglement between research and captivity … potentially of great value for an intersection of critical science and technology studies (STS) and race theory. * Choice *
£66.60
New York University Press Skin Theory
Book SynopsisHonorable Mention, Rachel Carson Prize, given by the Society for the Social Studies of ScienceFinalist, 2023 ASAP Book Award, given by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the PresentStudies the intersections of incarceration, medical science, and race in postwar AmericaIn February 1966, a local newspaper described the medical science program at Holmesburg Prison, Philadelphia, a golden opportunity to conduct widespread medical tests under perfect control conditions. Helmed by Albert M. Kligman, a University of Pennsylvania professor, these tests enrolled hundreds of the prison's predominantly Black population in studies determining the efficacy and safety of a wide variety of substances, from common household products to chemical warfare agents. These experiments at Holmesburg were hardly unique; in the postwar United States, the use of incarcerated test subjects was standard practice among many research institutions and pharmaceutical companies. Skin Theory examines the prisoTrade ReviewCristina Visperas speaks theory to history, overturning decades of documentation that sensationalizes Philadelphia’s infamous Holmesburg Prison and the medical experiments conducted there on the backs of Black subjects. Critical visual carceral studies is brought powerfully to bear on the science studies critique of biomedicine, institutions of state power, and technologies of race, showing us how the crumbling edifice of the prison system is structurally linked to the assault on Black skin inside its walls. * Lisa Cartwright, University of California, San Diego *Skin Theory is a provocative and thoroughly researched work that is essential reading for anyone invested in science and technology studies, critical investigations of race, and the prison abolition movement. Visperas deftly navigates the nuances of theory against infamously racist historical events to produce a book that is at once necessary and timely. * Jeffrey Allen Bennet, Vanderbilt University *Mejia Visperas (Univ. of Southern California) outlines a broader critical reenvisioning of these events, treating them as paradigmatic of the scientific racism inherent in the overall entanglement between research and captivity … potentially of great value for an intersection of critical science and technology studies (STS) and race theory. * Choice *
£23.74
University of Toronto Press The Technoscientific Witness of Rape
Book SynopsisThe Technoscientific Witness of Rape is the first book to chart the thirty-year history of the sexual assault evidence kit and its role in a criminal justice system that re-victimizes many assault victims in their quest for medical treatment and justice.Table of ContentsList of Figures Acknowledgements Epigraph * Introduction: Diffracting the Technoscientific Witness * Inscriptions of Doubt: Law, Anti-Rape Activism, and the Early SAEK * Stabilizing the SAEK: Controversies in Practice, Advocacy, and Expertise * Assembling the Genetic Technoscientific Witness: Visions of Justice, Safety, and the Stranger Rapist * Instability Within: The Technoscientific Witness in Contemporary Practice * Reassembling Technoscience: Troubled Pasts and Imagined Futures Appendix: Interview Sample References Notes
£45.90
University of Toronto Press A Nobel Affair
Book SynopsisA Nobel Affair is the first translation into English of the complete correspondence between Alfred Nobel and Sofie Hess.Trade Review‘For history buffs, this book is well worth reading.’ -- V.V. Raman * Choice Magazine vol 55:03:2017 *"Erika Rummel, an esteemed writer and historian, has translated and annotated the entire correspondence [between Sofie Hess and Alfred Nobel.] According to Rummel, the very fact the Nobel Foundation acquired the letters and kept them under lock and key for decades is an indication of their historical importance." -- Nathan Ron * Haaretz, July 15, 2018 *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Part I Nobel's Letters Part II Hess's Letters Appendix Works Cited
£60.35
University of Toronto Press Writing by Ear
Book SynopsisConsidering Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector’s literature as a case study and a source of theory, Writing by Ear presents an aural theory of the novel based on readings of Near to the Wild Heart (1943), The Besieged City (1949), The Passion According to G.H. (1964), Agua Viva (1973), The Hour of the Star (1977), and A Breath of Life (1978). What is the specific aesthetic for which listening-in-writing calls? What is the relation that listening-in-writing establishes with silence, echo, and the sounds of the world? How are we to understand authorship when writers present themselves as objects of reception rather than subjects of production? In which ways does the robust oral and aural culture of Brazil shape literary genres and forms? In addressing these questions, Writing by Ear works in dialogue with philosophy, psychoanalysis, and sound studies to contemplate the relationship between orality and writing. CiTable of Contents1. Introduction: A Certain Intimate Sense 2. Writing by Ear 3. The Aural Novel 4. Hearing the Wild Heart 5. Loud Object 6. The Echopoetics of G.H. 7. Coda: Hearing Horses
£51.00
University of Toronto Press Beauty or Statistics
Book SynopsisThe long tradition of livestock breeding in the Netherlands serves as a valuable example of the delicate balance between art and science, beauty and statistics in the modernizing field of agriculture.Trade Review"This book offers a magnificent panorama on animal husbandry, featuring concrete discussions on dairy cattle, chickens, pigs, sheep, and horses." -- Beat Bächi, University of Zurich * European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health *"A work of excellent scholarship that will be recommended reading for scholars interested in twentieth-century agricultural history and in the history of animal breeding and genetics." -- Tarquin Holmes * History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences *"This book beautifully straddles the line between the two apparently diverse (and often divisive) attitudes to breeding, because of a deep understanding of both genetic and practical breeding methods." -- Margaret E. Derry, University of Guelph * Agricultural History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Breeding for Nobility or for Production? Friesian Dairy Cattle The Breeders Get Organized Type and Tuberculosis The Moral Economy of Breeding Bloodlines and Purity Scientific Breeding Nobility or Production? Entrepreneurship Indexes Holsteinization Market and Moral Economy 2. “The most efficient chickens in the world” From Side Business to Mainstay Hybrid Breeding Hy-Line and Hendrix Genetics From Purebreds to First-Generation Crossbreds Industrialization Developments in Breeding Chickens are Not Peas 3. Breeding a Pig for all Parties Testing for Productive Traits Minkema’s Breeding Plan AI in Pigs Hybrid Pig Breeding The Breeder’s Eye Pigs are Not Chickens 4. Just Not Like any other Sheep Breed: The Texel Creating the Texel The Swifter Breeding by Numbers or By Eye AI in Texel Sheep What’s in a Breed? 5. From Farm Horse to Riding Horse: The Dutch Warmbloods Gelderlanders and Groningers Introducing “Hot Blood” Finding the Right Mix The Government Intervenes Scientific Breeding Balancing Practical and Scientific Methods Conclusions List of illustrations Sources Index
£56.10
University of Toronto Press The Technoscientific Witness of Rape
Book SynopsisIn 1984, the Sexual Assault Evidence Kit (SAEK) was dubbed Ontario’s most successful rapist trap. Since then, the kit has become the key source of evidence in the investigation and prosecution of sexual assault as well as a symbol of victims’ improved access to care and justice. Unfortunately, the SAEK has failed to live up to these promises. The Technoscientific Witness of Rape is the first book to chart the thirty year history of the sexual assault evidence kit and its role in a criminal justice system that re-victimizes many assault victims in their quest for medical treatment and justice. Drawing on actor-network theory and feminist technology studies, Andrea Quinlan combs through sixty-two interviews with police, nurses, scientists, and lawyers, as well as archival records and legal cases to trace changes in sexual assault forensics, law, advocacy, and anti-violence activism in Ontario. Through this history Quinlan bravely and provocatively argues thTable of ContentsList of Figures Acknowledgements Epigraph * Introduction: Diffracting the Technoscientific Witness * Inscriptions of Doubt: Law, Anti-Rape Activism, and the Early SAEK * Stabilizing the SAEK: Controversies in Practice, Advocacy, and Expertise * Assembling the Genetic Technoscientific Witness: Visions of Justice, Safety, and the Stranger Rapist * Instability Within: The Technoscientific Witness in Contemporary Practice * Reassembling Technoscience: Troubled Pasts and Imagined Futures Appendix: Interview Sample References Notes
£20.69
University of Toronto Press The Snakes of Ontario
Book SynopsisMany people have a great fear of snakes. This fear affects their peace of mind, their enjoyment of a holiday in the country, and even their pleasure in their own suburban gardens. It leads to the senseless destruction of one of our valuable natural resources. The morbid fear of snakes can only be dispelled by learning the true facts about these fascinating creatures. This book is addressed to anyone who wishes to learn about the natural history of snakes, or to identify those found in Ontario, but the author speaks particularly to young people, who, unless they have been prejudiced, have a natural interest in all living things. In an easy, conversational manner, the author gives a general account of snakes--what they are, how they travel, their instinct and intelligence, how they feed, their reproduction, hiberation, shedding of the skin, defences usefulness--and discusses popular beliefs and fear of snakes. The separate species are fully described in a simple, non-technical and re
£17.09
University of Toronto Press Systems and Computer Science
Book SynopsisThis book presents the papers delivered at the Conference on Systems and Computer Science held at the University of Western Ontario in September 1965. The primary purposes of the Conference were the promotion of research and the development of the teaching of computer science in Canadian universities. The papers focus attention on some of the concepts of Computer Science as a new field of study and at the same time provide a background for scientists looking at the subject for the first time.The chief developments in computer science have been concerned with the "applied" rather than the "pure" areas of the field: numerical analysis, applied statistics and operations research, and data processing. But there is something more to computers than the physical components and this book represents an attempt to correct the imbalance between "applied" and "pure" by drawing attention to certain theoretical aspects of computer and information science. Among the topics discussed are the
£20.69
University of Toronto Press The Cold Light of Dawn
Book SynopsisThe discovery in 1987 of a supernova brought to world attention the excellence of Canadian astronomers. As Richard Jarrell explains in this book, the path to excellence has been a long one. Although astronomy has been practised in this country from the earliest days of exploration, its professional status has slowly evolved in much the same way as has the nation itself. In the period of exploration and early settlement, the practical needs of navigators and surveyors were foremost. Astronomical practitioners – for many used astronomy but few were professional or even amateur astronomers – came from elsewhere. Only when Canada was a settled colony, halfway through the nineteenth century, did its own scientific needs emerge. By the century's end Canadian astronomy, socially and institutionally unique and independent, had been established: astronomers born and trained in Canada worked in their own organized and funded institutions. In the twentieth century t
£18.89
University of Toronto Press Taxonomy of Fungi Imperfecti
Book SynopsisMycologists have been searching for a better system of classification of Fungi Imperfecti than that based on mature morphology. This volume documents an intensive phase of that search. It is largely an account of the proceedings of the First International Specialists' Workshop Conference on Criteria and Terminology in the Classification of Fungi Imperfecti held at the Environmental Sciences Centre of the University of Calgary, Kananaskis, Alberta. The invited contributors, all mycologists of international reputation, have had long experience with Fungi Imperfecti.The first fifteen chapters follow the course of the conference: they reproduce the formal papers and the lively discussion which followed. Chapter 16 describes a new, experimental scheme of classification distilled from the conclusions reached at Kananaskis. Four chapters concerned with the application of this scheme and with a variety of techniques now being used to extend knowledge of the Fungi Imperfecti round out
£26.09
Cornell University Press The Taming of Evolution
Book SynopsisThe theory of evolution has clearly altered our views of the biological world, but in the study of human beings, evolutionary and preevolutionary views continue to coexist in a state of perpetual tension. The Taming of Evolution addresses the questions of how and why this is so. Davydd Greenwood offers a sustained critique of the nature/nurture debate, revealing the complexity of the relationship between science and ideology. He maintains that popular contemporary theories, most notably E. O. Wilson's human sociobiology and Marvin Harris's cultural materialism, represent pre-Darwinian notions overlaid by elaborate evolutionary terminology. Greenwood first details the humoral-environmental and Great Chain of Being theories that dominated Western thinking before Darwin. He systematically compares these ideas with those later influenced by Darwin's theories, illuminating the surprising continuities between them. Greenwood suggests that it would be neither difficult nor socially
£16.13
Cornell University Press Victorian Skin
Book SynopsisIn Victorian Skin, Pamela K. Gilbert uses literary, philosophical, medical, and scientific discourses about skin to trace the development of a broader discussion of what it meant to be human in the nineteenth century. Where is subjectivity located? How do we communicate with and understand each other''s feelings? How does our surface, which contains us and presents us to others, function and what does it signify? As Gilbert shows, for Victorians, the skin was a text to be read. Nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical perspectives had reconfigured the purpose and meaning of this organ as more than a wrapping and instead a membrane integral to the generation of the self. Victorian writers embraced this complex perspective on skin even as sanitary writings focused on the surface of the body as a dangerous point of contact between self and others. Drawing on novels and stories by Dickens, Collins, Hardy, and Wilde, among others, along with their French conteTrade ReviewGilbert offers abundant information in a framework that moves in and out of philosophical positions on identity, history, and understandings of what being human meant in the 19th century. * Choice *An invaluable contribution to research that emphatically shows the skin's central role in shaping nineteenth-century debates on the locus of subjectivity, the readability of surfaces, and the relation between the individual body and larger historical narratives. * Nineteenth-Century Contexts *Victorian Skin draws upon a wealth of literary, scientific and philosophical texts from across the nineteenth century to pursue a richly rewarding discussion on how shifting attitudes towards the body's surface relate to fundamental questions about the boundaries of the self, the inscription of identity and the unfolding of history.... It is interdisciplinary work in literary studies at its best: endlessly curious about the tangled relationship between literature and its contexts, and equally alert to the particularities of both the material bodies and the literary texts it examines. * Review of English Studies *Drawing from scientific, literary, medical, and political sources, Gilbert shows how skin and its various functions were interpreted over the course of the British nineteenth century.... Besides the richness of her scholarship, Gilbert's analysis of the history and representation of the skin in relation to realism ultimately gives way to texts that treat skin as a detachable signifier. Gilbert juxtaposes original literary readings with medical theory, cultural history, and many accounts that defy categorization. * Review 19 *This is a book about skin, its discursive side and potential to express interiority in Victorian culture. It is also a tale about the way skin transformed from a text that articulated a so-called surface identity, to a more complex, submerged one.... The volume is largely informed by literary theory... but equally rooted in the most influential historical work on the skin. * Social History of Medicine *Victorian Skin stands not only as testimony to skin's capacity to organize, if not always to envelop, a vast range of social, cultural, aesthetic, and political functions, but also as an exemplification of the kind of Victorianist historicism for which the field has become best known over the past several decades. * Nineteenth-Century Literature *An important and unique study of the manifold significances of the skin in Victorian thought... a book of extraordinary intellectual capaciousness.... Gilbert contributes notably to conversations in literature and science and the medical humanities, while also (more briefly) providing new material for scholars of race, empire and (post)colonialism. Victorian Skin is an especially absorbing contribution to the rapidly developing scholarship around the nineteenth century's species politics. * Journal of Victorian Culture *This book is a great addition to the field, a thought-provoking, wonderfully erudite, and seminal text. I foresee it engendering a plethora of PhD research, studies, articles, and conferences. * British Association for Victorian Studies *Pamela Gilbert's Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History is a learned and imaginative work of cultural history and literary criticism... Readers will benefit from this deeply embedded, while also defamiliarized, assessment of the nineteenth century. There is little here that escapes Gilbert's generous and thoughtful attention. * Journal of British Studies *Victorian Skin focuses our attention compellingly on an aspect of nineteenth-century culture that has long been simultaneously right before our eyes and yet remained largely invisible. Exploring the connections between the cutaneous self and narratives of the historical trajectory helps us see the richly complex significations skin carried throughout the period. * Dickens Quarterly *Gilbert interweaves literature, Scottish common sense and German idealist philosophy, and physiology's intersection with cognition in her brilliant Victorian Skin. * Victorian Poetry *Victorian Skin draws upon a wealth of literary, scientific and philosophical texts from across the nineteenth century to pursue a richly rewarding discussion on how shifting attitudes towards the body's surface relate to fundamental questions about the boundaries of the self, the inscription of identity and the unfolding of history. It will be of interest not only to literary scholars of the Victorian period, but also to those engaged more broadly with work on the senses, the emotions, and the medical humanities. * Review of English Studies *[...]fascinating—and fascinatingly inventive—new book[...] * Victorians Institute Journal *
£42.30
Cornell University Press Louis Agassiz as a Teacher
Book SynopsisBy a succession of living pictures, as it were, this book shows the eminent naturalist in the very act of teaching. Sometimes he himself speaks, sometimes distinguished pupils of his reveal in their own words the process by which they were led to nature through direct and independent observation. The enthusiasm of their accounts is contagious.This collection of illustrative extracts on the ideals and practice of Louis Agassiz is probably unique in giving the actual methods of a great man of science in developing good students who could, in their turn, wisely instruct others. The book should be in the hands of all teachers, and of those who are preparing to teach.Trade ReviewThis is a little book that every teacher, not only of Nature and Science, but any subject, would do well to read. * Nature Magazine *
£15.99
Stanford University Press The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge
Book SynopsisChallenging the "two cultures" debate, The Experimental Imagination tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds in the British Enlightenment. Tita Chico shows that early science relied on what she calls literary knowledge to present its experimental findings. More radically, she contends that science was made intellectually possible because its main discoveries and technologies could be articulated in literary terms. While early scientists deployed metaphor to describe the phenomena they defined and imagination to cast themselves as experimentalists, literary writers used scientific metaphors to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge. Drawing on literature as well as literary language, tropes, and interpretive methods, literary knowledge challenges our dominant narrative of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non of epistemological innovation in the British Enlightenment. With its recourse to imagination as a more reliable source of truth than any empirical account, literary knowledge facilitates a redefinition of authority and evidence, as well as of the self and society, implicitly articulating the difference that would come to distinguish the arts and sciences.Trade Review"The Experimental Imagination reveals the deep connections between and across the realms of literature and science. Tita Chico shows that literary modes enabled key developments in the new scientific practice, and, reciprocally, that the definition of art itself is based on a profound alliance between aesthetics and experimental philosophy. This is a fertile and important intervention in integrative thinking about the long eighteenth century." -- Laura Brown * Cornell University *"Starting from the elegant assertion that 'science is a literary trope,' Tita Chico offers illuminating, expert readings that fully vindicate her claims to make an original and important contribution to the evolving understanding of British Enlightenment culture." -- Robert DeMaria, Jr. * Vassar College *"Subtle, learned, and inventive at every turn, The Experimental Imagination is essential reading for anyone seeking to rethink the relationship between literature and science in the eighteenth century. The effort to join these histories is one of the great projects of our time. This book is the state of the art." -- Jonathan Kramnick * Yale University *"Tita Chico's The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment does no less than offer a landmark contribution to both literary studies and the history of science and technology....Chico's study offers a timely, relevant, and consistently exciting set of arguments....The Experimental Imagination's theoretical and methodological lenses serve as a call to arms for scholars of these fields to perform more nuanced intersectional work that will productively explore how issues of race, gender, and power amplify, echo, and inform literary-scientific discourse in the later eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries and beyond." -- Danielle Spratt * Digital Defoe *"Chico sketches out what she calls the "experimental imagination," a mixture of plot forms and rhetorical aesthetics, which underwrites the profound social and cultural transformations of the British Enlightenment. She traces the long, difficult disentanglement of objectivity from poetry and romance—or, really, the construction of objectivity as one creative mode of discourse among others." -- Sean Silver * Los Angeles Review of Books *"[The Experimental Imagination] offers up some rich, highly suggestive texts that confirm the idea that the literary imagination was integral to the development of early science." -- Sharon Ruston * Times Literary Supplement *"The Experimental Imagination constitutes a tremendous addition to scholarship regarding eighteenth-century British literature, science, intellectual history, aesthetics, gender, and Enlightenment as well as the intellectual functions of literature more generally. It usefully extends the archive of what constitutes and concerns scientific writing in the period."––J. Ereck Jarvis, Review of English Studies"Chico powerfully models how literary texts are central to understanding the history of science despite the field's historical resistance to the literary....[Her] framework of affective epistemology opens new avenues for thinking about the unique role of feeling in histories of science."––Travis Chi Wing Lau, Eighteenth-Century Fiction"This is an insightful and enviably disciplined book about a predisciplinary moment." -- Jayne Lewis * Studies in English Literature *"Tita Chico's learned and eloquent book leverages the superior status of literature over science in the Enlightenment by thinking about how literature made natural philosophical knowledge itself possible....Chico's deft recognition of the period's capacious understanding of something like literariness transforms what we think we know about literature and science." -- Richard C. Sha * Eighteenth-Century Studies *"The Experimental Imagination envisions an exciting way forward for literature scholars interested in the history and future of knowledge production....Chico's book is extraordinary, and not to be missed by anyone interested in early modern and Enlightenment literature, history, and natural philosophy." -- Aaron R. Hanlon * Genre *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis introduction challenges the "two cultures" debate about disciplinarity. Critical studies of literature and science have not presented a satisfactory understanding of the two domains' comingling and reciprocity. Early science formulated itself through literary knowledge: natural philosophers relied on literariness not only to present experimental findings but also to imagine the practice of science. The multiplicity and diversity of allusions to science in the long eighteenth-century literary archive reflect an understanding of literary knowledge as epistemologically superior. Natural philosophical practice requires yet obscures the imaginative practice; literary knowledge embraces this impulse as a way of understanding the world at large. The experimental imagination encapsulates the process and effects of literary knowledge as an epistemology. The keywords literary knowledge, science, trope, and gender reveal core concepts that enable myriad writers to posit alternative models of experience, authority, and evidence. 1"Literary Knowledge" chapter abstractNatural philosophy in the long eighteenth century connoted a sense of modernity and enlightenment, attributes that bound science to meanings in excess of its practice and consumption. The pliancy of science as a trope finds support in reflections on language as a scientific tool by Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and other natural philosophers. The two dominant technologies of the experimental imagination are the observed particular and the modest witness. Observed particulars of empirical study are those nuggets of data that disclose themselves and, in their revelation, produce knowledge. The modest witness is the individual who is objective by virtue of erasing himself through his privilege. Tropes are literary tools that not only enable practitioners to describe scientific findings, but also enable an even more fundamental component of experimentalism: literariness makes possible the conceptualization of scientific findings and the individual who produces them. 2"Immodest Witnesses" chapter abstractThe character of the immodest witness embodies the self-interest, sexual desire, and circulation of wealth implicitly bound up with the practice of experimental philosophy. The characterization of Gimcracks in Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso, James Miller's The Humours of Oxford, and Susannah Centlivre's The Basset-Table and coquettes in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Spectator and Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator all represent self-interest. In plays and periodicals, characterization, metaphor, and plot together reveal the logic of self-interest undergirding claims to scientific objectivity. If the ideal natural philosopher removed himself to achieve objectivity, then the Gimcrack and coquette were defined by an inability to overcome prejudice and desires, speaking for themselves rather than for the object. For some, this form of bias leads to self-delusion, eroticism, and social obstruction, but for others, it allows a new form of self-directed agency and social, even moral, improvement. 3"Scientific Seduction" chapter abstractBeginning with Bacon, natural philosophy texts frequently present scientific practice as an erotic quest, establishing a correspondence between sexual seduction and natural philosophical inquiry. Bernard de Fontenelle's and Francesco Algarotti's scientific dialogues, translated by Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Carter, respectively, adopt the literary plot of seduction to explain and promote Cartesianism, Copernicanism, and Newtonianism. Both Behn and Carter embrace the suitability of natural philosophical education for women. For Fontenelle and Algarotti, understanding science necessitates new ways of thinking that are possible only with one's imagination and requires that characters undergo a process of seduction. Learning science is a conversion process, simultaneously rational and affective. Mathematicians, like lovers, are persuasive and persistent, ultimately demanding submission. These scientific dialogues reframe erotic plots to promote intellectual and moral self-improvement, qualities posited as uniquely modern and widely available to the texts' readers. 4"Political Science" chapter abstractLate seventeenth-century natural philosophers inherited the conjunction of politics and science at the core of Francis Bacon's experimental project. Thomas Sprat's The History of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels use the conventions of literary knowledge to express their scientific-political visions, insisting that natural philosophy cannot be understood apart from the political institutions enabling and enabled by its practice and promulgation. These writers use the experimental imagination to envisage, in turn, civil government, absolutist monarchy, and imperialism. Sprat advances scientific triumphalism and a model for schooling gentlemen into civil society. 5"When Science Becomes Literature" chapter abstractThe eighteenth-century aesthetic theories of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson use scientific tropes, consequently revealing the reciprocity of scientific and literary epistemologies. Poets use an expressly aesthetic mode to imagine beyond the limits of experimental knowledge, even though eighteenth-century aesthetics takes shape through unacknowledged appropriation of scientific structures and processes. With this reciprocity obscured, natural philosophy may well disclose sights unseen, but poetry does more. In Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, poems inspired by Queen Caroline's homage to British theological and scientific accomplishments in her Richmond Hermitage, and James Thomson's The Seasons, science becomes literature: aesthetic mediations of natural philosophy draw on but also challenge the intellectual work of science, and mount a case for the epistemological superiority of the literary.
£86.40
Stanford University Press What Is Real?
Book SynopsisEighty years ago, Ettore Majorana, a brilliant student of Enrico Fermi, disappeared under mysterious circumstances while going by ship from Palermo to Naples. How is it possible that the most talented physicist of his generation vanished without leaving a trace? It has long been speculated that Majorana decided to abandon physics, disappearing because he had precociously realized that nuclear fission would inevitably lead to the atomic bomb. This book advances a different hypothesis. Through a careful analysis of Majorana's article "The Value of Statistical Laws in Physics and Social Sciences," which shows how in quantum physics reality is dissolved into probability, and in dialogue with Simone Weil's considerations on the topic, Giorgio Agamben suggests that, by disappearing into thin air, Majorana turned his very person into an exemplary cipher of the status of the real in our probabilistic universe. In so doing, the physicist posed a question to science that is still awaiting an answer: What is Real?
£57.60
Stanford University Press Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became
Book SynopsisDivine Variations offers a new account of the development of scientific ideas about race. Focusing on the production of scientific knowledge over the last three centuries, Terence Keel uncovers the persistent links between pre-modern Christian thought and contemporary scientific perceptions of human difference. He argues that, instead of a rupture between religion and modern biology on the question of human origins, modern scientific theories of race are, in fact, an extension of Christian intellectual history. Keel's study draws on ancient and early modern theological texts and biblical commentaries, works in Christian natural philosophy, seminal studies in ethnology and early social science, debates within twentieth-century public health research, and recent genetic analysis of population differences and ancient human DNA. From these sources, Keel demonstrates that Christian ideas about creation, ancestry, and universalism helped form the basis of modern scientific accounts of human diversity—despite the ostensible shift in modern biology towards scientific naturalism, objectivity, and value neutrality. By showing the connections between Christian thought and scientific racial thinking, this book calls into question the notion that science and religion are mutually exclusive intellectual domains and proposes that the advance of modern science did not follow a linear process of secularization. Trade Review"Divine Variations brilliantly traces the roots of modern racial science to Christian intellectual history and ideology. Despite the efforts of genomic researchers to portray current biological concepts of race as purely scientific, Keel shows that these scientists are secular creationists retelling religious folklore about the origins of human life. This book is a crucial contribution to the history of racial science." -- Dorothy Roberts * author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century *"At a moment when some evolutionary theorists have become quasi-theologians, offering universal stories of existence that are as imperialistic as their eighteenth- and nineteenth- century versions, and when popular DNA speculations about racial heritage and legacy have brought us back to the door of eugenics, Keel's book reminds us of the theological trajectories from which these concepts arise. This is not an anti-science text, but one that shows us the interrelationship of theology and science and tacit assumptions behind the scientific will to universalize. We will never be able to defeat racial reasoning so long as it is concealed and nurtured in certain kinds of scientific reasoning. Keel's book greatly aids us in separating the two." -- Willie James Jennings * author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race *"The brilliance of Terence Keel's book is to show that when it comes to race, there was no war between science and religion. Instead, this engaging and penetrating study shows how Christian ideas helped create scientific approaches to and explanations of race. Divine Variations is a must-read for all scholars of race, religion, and science." -- Edward J. Blum * co-author of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America *"In this brilliantly argued and fascinating account of the development of scientific racial theory, Keel convincingly demonstrates that the modern biological sciences still bear the deep imprint of their religious origins. Divine Variations offers us insightful new ways of thinking about the historical relations between science and religion." -- Peter Harrison * author of The Territories of Science and Religion *"Terence Keel's book brings needed nuance to the cultural and scientific history of the study of human diversity. He explores the connections between the theology and science of what eventually became human microevolution, and follows the various threads down to the present day. This is an important body of scholarship, with which anyone interested in the scientific origins of human racial theory must engage." -- Jonathan Marks * author of What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People and Their Genes *"Terence Keel's Divine Variations points us to the materials, the old patterns and the stitches that built our modern notion of race.... Keel's work offers us a warning that there is no panacea, no easy ideology or system that is free from the colonial theologies or so called "enlightened" philosophies. But in the face of this, and in the midst of a world where we are confronted by ever more differences and unknowns, perhaps our hope is best oriented towards theologies and scientific modes of thought that do not try to avoid the mystery, that do not wash out or totalize exceptions. Perhaps we no longer need "theories of everything" but rather theologies and science that help us to see variation, difference, and change as possibilities rather than as dangers. Keel's work is a vital step toward this endeavor." -- Brian Bantum * Reading Religion *"This volume is a critical contribution to study of the concept of race and a formidable challenge to many commonplace assumptions. Equally important, it compels the reader to reevaluate the extent to which science and religion are clearly distinct realms of thought, and offers new ways of thinking about their relationship....Summing up: Essential." -- S.C. Peterson * CHOICE *"Our longing to know where we came from and what lies ahead is fierce. But what if neither science nor religion can offer those comforts?...What I find most gripping about Keel's argument is that he does not denigrate either discipline so much as he goads us to acknowledge their shared problematic epistemological impulse." -- Michelle Wolff * The Journal of Religion *"[Divine Variations] offers an original and ambitious interpretation of science and religion, one that largely avoids framing these interactions in terms of conflict or compatibility, to address a very timely subject: race." -- Ernie Hamm * Zygon *"It is widely appreciated that current struggles over race and racism are crucially shaped by the history of racism....Terence Keel masterfully demonstrates how this is true not only with respect to the legacy of historical racism on ongoing racialized inequality; it is also manifest in how modern scientific approaches to race have been informed by religious conceptions." -- Bruce Baum * American Historical Review *"[Keel] overturns assumptions of an inherent conflict between religion and science by showing that modern Western science borrows ideas and questions from Christianity." -- Sabrina Danielsen * Sociology of Religion *"[It] is de rigueur to speak of the modern concept of 'race' as solely a product of enlightenment-era scientific thought....It is here that Terence Keel enters the fray and forcefully disrupts the narrative....While the cult of racial essentialism continues to attract new acolytes, Keel's apocrypha certainly threatens its newfound articles of faith." -- Matthew W. Hughey * Ethnic and Racial Studies *"Divine Variations shows that Christianity represents a dominant paradigm for many ways of knowing, and thus its presence in racial science is not unusual but actually expected." -- Ayah Nuriddin * Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences *"Keel's framework opens up a new way of looking at the problem of race, and a way to account for the role of both Western science and Christian supremacy in the global work of enslavement, the creation of plantation economies, and the violence of settler colonialism....Divine Variations is a pioneering effort in the historical study of race and racism, as well as science and religion." -- Myrna Perez Sheldon * Religious Studies Review *"Keel provides strong historical evidence for the view that science and religion are to be seen as two cultural efforts that need to be related in much more diverse and complicated ways than is usually accepted....Divine Variations is a book that must be considered by historians, philosophers and scientists alike." -- Juan Manuel Rodriguez-Caso * Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe Introduction lays out the theoretical stakes of the work as a whole. It opens with a critical evaluation of the work of acclaimed geneticist Spencer Wells, whose 2002 publication The Journey of Man has helped frame the now-standard interpretation of human evolution and migration from a single set of ancestors out of Africa. Wells's account of human evolution reveals the epistemic authority that modern genetics has obtained on the question of race and human beginnings. It is argued that contemporary biologists inherited this authority, however, from their Christian intellectual ancestors, who provided modern scientists with a cache of interpretive tools and assumptions that proved useful for narrating the development of human life and constructing theories of racial difference believed to supersede all previous accounts of human origins. After laying out the theoretical ground to be covered, this introductory chapter provides an overview of the chapters that follow. 1Impure Thoughts: Johann Blumenbach and the Birth of Racial Science chapter abstractChapter 1 examines the thought of the eighteenth-century ethnologist Johann F. Blumenbach, whose 1775 work On the Natural Variety of Mankind is often represented as precipitating the secular turn in the modern study of race. The chapter offers an alternative account of the intellectual ancestry alive in Blumenbach's racial theories by recovering the Christian sources of his thinking. Political and philosophical anti-Judaism prevalent in late eighteenth-century Germany, the transformation of the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther into a pioneer of German national identity, and the anti-Jewish writings of Johann David Michaelis in the emergent field of biblical geography at Göttingen University were all crucial political, religious, and intellectual influences during the time Blumenbach developed his racial theories. Drawing on the notion that the epistemological origins of racial science are fundamentally mongrel, this chapter argues that Blumenbach's racial theories were not an expression of pure, untainted, secular rationality. 2Superseding Christian Truth: The Quiet Revolution of Nineteenth-Century American Science of Race chapter abstractChapter 2 analyzes scientific criticism leveled against the theory of common human descent beginning in the 1830s. It focuses on the thought of Josiah C. Nott, a southern physician, early epidemiologist, and major figure of the so-called American School of Ethnology. Nott claimed that humanity's common origin, or monogenesis, was an unscientific belief and a mere carryover from when natural historians were indebted to Christian ideas about nature and human life. Thus, he attempted to establish an account of the history of human racial groups that moved beyond the constraints of the narrative recorded by Moses in the Bible. Despite these secular aspirations Nott ultimately failed to offer an account of race that stood independent of Christian thought. The case of American polygenism illustrates the degree to which modern racial science is indebted to a religious intellectual history it has attempted to deny and supersede. 3The Ghost of Christian Creationism: Racial Dispositions and Progressive Era Public Health Research chapter abstractChapter 3 explores how polygenist carryovers emerged in early twentieth-century medical and public health studies on the links between race and disease. This persistence further embedded ideas about race derived from Christian intellectual history into the methods and reasoning of modern scientists and public health researchers. In the early twentieth century, the concept of biological determinism—the idea that the fixed biological makeup of a racial group determines its members' health, behavior, and intelligence—reoccupies the epistemic space once filled explicitly by a theological view of nature. This chapter also introduces the work of the African American physician, ethicist, and social hygienist Charles V. Roman, who departed from the racial logic of his time. Roman stressed instead that the idea of common human ancestry should push public health researchers to think more critically about the social and environmental factors shaping health outcomes and black susceptibility to disease. 4Noah's Mongrel Children: Ancient DNA and the Persistence of Christian Forms in Modern Biology chapter abstractChapter 4 examines how concepts about racial ancestry and the ontological uniqueness of human life from Christian intellectual history have historically informed scientific research on the Neanderthal. These Christian forms are at play in the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome and the unanticipated discovery that mating occurred between this hominid group and modern humans around forty thousand years ago. Geneticists claim that evidence of this encounter is found almost exclusively in the genomes of Europeans and Asians. This chapter also shows how scientists in both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries deployed notions of distinct continental groups and fixed racial traits to draw conclusions about human-Neanderthal relatedness. In both centuries, concepts and reasoning strategies implicitly divinize nature while also framing human ancestry into three original groups that represent the reoccupation of the story of Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, into contemporary algorithmic representations of human genetic ancestry. 5Beyond the Religious Pursuit of Race chapter abstractChapter 5 provides a summary of the major claims of the book. It also explains how the conflict thesis for representing the relationship between science and religion fails to capture how Christian intellectual history has been key to the formation of the race concept in modern science. Citing recent data from a 2015 Pew Research Survey, this chapter argues that the conflict thesis remains a fixture in the minds of Americans, which has consequences for shifting public perceptions about the assumed secularity of the scientific study of race. It closes with a call for recognizing that the scientific study of race is involved in providing a solution to the existential dilemma of defining what it means to be human. This solution is neither value-free nor detached from the cultural and religious inheritance that has fastened itself to the work of Euro-American scientists who study race.
£21.59
Stanford University Press Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History
Book SynopsisIn 1938, one year into the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese military found itself in dire medical straits. Soldiers were suffering from deadly illnesses, and were unable to receive blood transfusions for their wounds. The urgent need for medical assistance prompted an unprecedented flowering of scientific knowledge in China and Taiwan throughout the twentieth century. Wayne Soon draws on archives from three continents to argue that Overseas Chinese were key to this development, utilizing their global connections and diasporic links to procure much-needed money, supplies, and medical expertise. The remarkable expansion of care and education that they spurred saved more than four million lives and trained more than fifteen thousand medical personnel. Moreover, the introduction of military medicine shifted biomedicine out of elite, urban civilian institutions and laboratories and transformed it into an adaptive field-based practice for all. Universal care, practical medical education, and mobile medicine are all lasting legacies of this effort.Trade Review"Wayne Soon's excellent book shows how elite diasporic actors were a powerful force in the development of Chinese biomedicine. They injected their visions into policy discussions, mobilized their networks, and led with an authority based on their experiences and expertise. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, Soon breaks new ground in illustrating how diaspora is a rich category of analysis for knowledge and institutional production."—Shelly Chan, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Santa Cruz"Global Medicine in China could not be more-timely or more relevant. As we face a life-altering pandemic in the twenty-first century, this study provides powerful historical lessons about how the local and global have always been intertwined in the history of public health and modern medicine. Opening with the Manchurian Plague of 1911 and moving to wartime medicine, the book sheds important light on how overseas Chinese diasporic figures played a crucial role in the making of biomedicine in modern China. This book is a must read for all of us today as we are reminded daily of the global entanglements of health and politics."—Eugenia Lean, Columbia University"Global Medicine in China demonstrates the central roles Overseas Chinese played to integrate biomedicine into the military medicine of war-torn Republican China. This illuminating transnational history integrates major biomedical transformations within the dramatic political convulsions of mid-century China."—Marta Hanson, Johns Hopkins University"Wayne Soon's book on the rise of global medicine in China in the first half of the twentieth century addresses its lessons directly to the People's Republic of China in the midst of a global pandemic—transparency and global cooperation are key to coming to terms with a health crisis... It offers a necessary corrective to a false dichotomy that medical developments were either indigenous or imperialist interventions."—David Luesink, Technology and Culture"Although scholars have paid plenty of attention to Dr Wu Lien-Teh, the efforts of other prominent medical personalities and Overseas Chinese as a whole have as yet been under-researched. Soon's new book represents a timely effort to fill this academic gap and offers a new lens through which to understand how China and the world have been connected through the Chinese diaspora."—Yan Yang, Journal of Chinese Overseas"This meticulous study is based upon research in more than twenty archives and libraries on three continents. In addition to re-centering the role of the Chinese diaspora in global health history, Soon follows both monetary donations and disagreements about how to best develop biomedicine across boundaries, both geopolitical and temporal."—Rachel Core, Bulletin of the History of MedicineTable of ContentsIntroductory Chapter: Diasporic Medicine 1. Prewar International Strategies 2. Wartime Military Medicine 3. Making Blood Banking Work 4. Transnational Politics of Military Medical Education 5. Reconstructing Biomedicine across the Taiwan Straits Concluding Chapter: Legacies of Wartime Medicine
£92.80
Stanford University Press The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge
Book SynopsisChallenging the "two cultures" debate, The Experimental Imagination tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds in the British Enlightenment. Tita Chico shows that early science relied on what she calls literary knowledge to present its experimental findings. More radically, she contends that science was made intellectually possible because its main discoveries and technologies could be articulated in literary terms. While early scientists deployed metaphor to describe the phenomena they defined and imagination to cast themselves as experimentalists, literary writers used scientific metaphors to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge. Drawing on literature as well as literary language, tropes, and interpretive methods, literary knowledge challenges our dominant narrative of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non of epistemological innovation in the British Enlightenment. With its recourse to imagination as a more reliable source of truth than any empirical account, literary knowledge facilitates a redefinition of authority and evidence, as well as of the self and society, implicitly articulating the difference that would come to distinguish the arts and sciences.Trade Review"The Experimental Imagination reveals the deep connections between and across the realms of literature and science. Tita Chico shows that literary modes enabled key developments in the new scientific practice, and, reciprocally, that the definition of art itself is based on a profound alliance between aesthetics and experimental philosophy. This is a fertile and important intervention in integrative thinking about the long eighteenth century." -- Laura Brown * Cornell University *"Starting from the elegant assertion that 'science is a literary trope,' Tita Chico offers illuminating, expert readings that fully vindicate her claims to make an original and important contribution to the evolving understanding of British Enlightenment culture." -- Robert DeMaria, Jr. * Vassar College *"Subtle, learned, and inventive at every turn, The Experimental Imagination is essential reading for anyone seeking to rethink the relationship between literature and science in the eighteenth century. The effort to join these histories is one of the great projects of our time. This book is the state of the art." -- Jonathan Kramnick * Yale University *"Tita Chico's The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment does no less than offer a landmark contribution to both literary studies and the history of science and technology....Chico's study offers a timely, relevant, and consistently exciting set of arguments....The Experimental Imagination's theoretical and methodological lenses serve as a call to arms for scholars of these fields to perform more nuanced intersectional work that will productively explore how issues of race, gender, and power amplify, echo, and inform literary-scientific discourse in the later eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries and beyond." -- Danielle Spratt * Digital Defoe *"Chico sketches out what she calls the "experimental imagination," a mixture of plot forms and rhetorical aesthetics, which underwrites the profound social and cultural transformations of the British Enlightenment. She traces the long, difficult disentanglement of objectivity from poetry and romance—or, really, the construction of objectivity as one creative mode of discourse among others." -- Sean Silver * Los Angeles Review of Books *"[The Experimental Imagination] offers up some rich, highly suggestive texts that confirm the idea that the literary imagination was integral to the development of early science." -- Sharon Ruston * Times Literary Supplement *"The Experimental Imagination constitutes a tremendous addition to scholarship regarding eighteenth-century British literature, science, intellectual history, aesthetics, gender, and Enlightenment as well as the intellectual functions of literature more generally. It usefully extends the archive of what constitutes and concerns scientific writing in the period."––J. Ereck Jarvis, Review of English Studies"Chico powerfully models how literary texts are central to understanding the history of science despite the field's historical resistance to the literary....[Her] framework of affective epistemology opens new avenues for thinking about the unique role of feeling in histories of science."––Travis Chi Wing Lau, Eighteenth-Century Fiction"This is an insightful and enviably disciplined book about a predisciplinary moment." -- Jayne Lewis * Studies in English Literature *"Tita Chico's learned and eloquent book leverages the superior status of literature over science in the Enlightenment by thinking about how literature made natural philosophical knowledge itself possible....Chico's deft recognition of the period's capacious understanding of something like literariness transforms what we think we know about literature and science." -- Richard C. Sha * Eighteenth-Century Studies *"The Experimental Imagination envisions an exciting way forward for literature scholars interested in the history and future of knowledge production....Chico's book is extraordinary, and not to be missed by anyone interested in early modern and Enlightenment literature, history, and natural philosophy." -- Aaron R. Hanlon * Genre *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis introduction challenges the "two cultures" debate about disciplinarity. Critical studies of literature and science have not presented a satisfactory understanding of the two domains' comingling and reciprocity. Early science formulated itself through literary knowledge: natural philosophers relied on literariness not only to present experimental findings but also to imagine the practice of science. The multiplicity and diversity of allusions to science in the long eighteenth-century literary archive reflect an understanding of literary knowledge as epistemologically superior. Natural philosophical practice requires yet obscures the imaginative practice; literary knowledge embraces this impulse as a way of understanding the world at large. The experimental imagination encapsulates the process and effects of literary knowledge as an epistemology. The keywords literary knowledge, science, trope, and gender reveal core concepts that enable myriad writers to posit alternative models of experience, authority, and evidence. 1"Literary Knowledge" chapter abstractNatural philosophy in the long eighteenth century connoted a sense of modernity and enlightenment, attributes that bound science to meanings in excess of its practice and consumption. The pliancy of science as a trope finds support in reflections on language as a scientific tool by Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and other natural philosophers. The two dominant technologies of the experimental imagination are the observed particular and the modest witness. Observed particulars of empirical study are those nuggets of data that disclose themselves and, in their revelation, produce knowledge. The modest witness is the individual who is objective by virtue of erasing himself through his privilege. Tropes are literary tools that not only enable practitioners to describe scientific findings, but also enable an even more fundamental component of experimentalism: literariness makes possible the conceptualization of scientific findings and the individual who produces them. 2"Immodest Witnesses" chapter abstractThe character of the immodest witness embodies the self-interest, sexual desire, and circulation of wealth implicitly bound up with the practice of experimental philosophy. The characterization of Gimcracks in Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso, James Miller's The Humours of Oxford, and Susannah Centlivre's The Basset-Table and coquettes in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Spectator and Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator all represent self-interest. In plays and periodicals, characterization, metaphor, and plot together reveal the logic of self-interest undergirding claims to scientific objectivity. If the ideal natural philosopher removed himself to achieve objectivity, then the Gimcrack and coquette were defined by an inability to overcome prejudice and desires, speaking for themselves rather than for the object. For some, this form of bias leads to self-delusion, eroticism, and social obstruction, but for others, it allows a new form of self-directed agency and social, even moral, improvement. 3"Scientific Seduction" chapter abstractBeginning with Bacon, natural philosophy texts frequently present scientific practice as an erotic quest, establishing a correspondence between sexual seduction and natural philosophical inquiry. Bernard de Fontenelle's and Francesco Algarotti's scientific dialogues, translated by Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Carter, respectively, adopt the literary plot of seduction to explain and promote Cartesianism, Copernicanism, and Newtonianism. Both Behn and Carter embrace the suitability of natural philosophical education for women. For Fontenelle and Algarotti, understanding science necessitates new ways of thinking that are possible only with one's imagination and requires that characters undergo a process of seduction. Learning science is a conversion process, simultaneously rational and affective. Mathematicians, like lovers, are persuasive and persistent, ultimately demanding submission. These scientific dialogues reframe erotic plots to promote intellectual and moral self-improvement, qualities posited as uniquely modern and widely available to the texts' readers. 4"Political Science" chapter abstractLate seventeenth-century natural philosophers inherited the conjunction of politics and science at the core of Francis Bacon's experimental project. Thomas Sprat's The History of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels use the conventions of literary knowledge to express their scientific-political visions, insisting that natural philosophy cannot be understood apart from the political institutions enabling and enabled by its practice and promulgation. These writers use the experimental imagination to envisage, in turn, civil government, absolutist monarchy, and imperialism. Sprat advances scientific triumphalism and a model for schooling gentlemen into civil society. 5"When Science Becomes Literature" chapter abstractThe eighteenth-century aesthetic theories of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson use scientific tropes, consequently revealing the reciprocity of scientific and literary epistemologies. Poets use an expressly aesthetic mode to imagine beyond the limits of experimental knowledge, even though eighteenth-century aesthetics takes shape through unacknowledged appropriation of scientific structures and processes. With this reciprocity obscured, natural philosophy may well disclose sights unseen, but poetry does more. In Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, poems inspired by Queen Caroline's homage to British theological and scientific accomplishments in her Richmond Hermitage, and James Thomson's The Seasons, science becomes literature: aesthetic mediations of natural philosophy draw on but also challenge the intellectual work of science, and mount a case for the epistemological superiority of the literary.
£23.39
Stanford University Press Sensitive Witnesses: Feminist Materialism in the
Book SynopsisKristin M. Girten tells a new story of feminist knowledge-making in the Enlightenment era by exploring the British female philosophers who asserted their authority through the celebration of profoundly embodied observations, experiences, and experiments. This book explores the feminist materialist practice of sensitive witnessing, establishing an alternate history of the emergence of the scientific method in the eighteenth century. Francis Bacon and other male natural philosophers regularly downplayed the embodied nature of their observations. They presented themselves as modest witnesses, detached from their environment and entitled to the domination and exploitation of it. In contrast, the author-philosophers that Girten takes up asserted themselves as intimately entangled with matter—boldly embracing their perceived close association with the material world as women. Girten shows how Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Smith took inspiration from materialist principles to challenge widely accepted "modest" conventions for practicing and communicating philosophy. Forerunners of the feminist materialism of today, these thinkers recognized the kinship of human and nonhuman nature and suggested a more accessible, inclusive version of science. Girten persuasively argues that our understanding of Enlightenment thought must take into account these sensitive witnesses' visions of an alternative scientific method informed by profound closeness with the natural world.Trade Review"Girten demonstrates, thoroughly and convincingly, that materialism constituted an alternative conception of early science to the mainstream, Baconian view. This is an important book, very much part of one of the central conversations currently unfolding in science and literature studies."—Jess Keiser, Tufts University"Sensitive Witnesses is a fluently written and well-researched study that moves nimbly between philosophical sources and a wide range of literary genres to enrich our understanding of Enlightenment ways of knowing."—Sarah Tindal Kareem, University of California, Los Angeles"A figure for our own time, Girten's sensitive witness emerges as the unashamed hero of a history of scientific passions."—Wendy Anne Lee, New York University
£49.30
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Trans America: A Counter-History
Book SynopsisTrans seems to be everywhere in American culture. Yet there is little understanding of how this came about. Are people aware that there were earlier periods of gender flexibility and contestability in American history? How well known is it that a previous period of trans visibility in the 1960s and early 1970s faced a vehement backlash right at the time that trans, in the form of what was then termed transvestism and transsexuality, seemed to be so ascendant? Was there transness before transsexuality was named in the 1950s and transgender emerged in the 1990s? Barry Reay explores this history: from a time before trans in the nineteenth century to the transsexual moment of the 1960s and 1970s, the transgender turn of the 1990s, and the so-called tipping point of current culture. It is a rich and varied history, where same-sex desires and identities, cross-dressing, and transsexual and transgender identities jostled for recognition. It is a history that is not at all flattering to US psychiatric and surgical practices. Arguing for the complexity of a trans past and present, Trans America will be a groundbreaking work for the trans community, as well as anyone interested in the history of medicine, sexuality, psychology and psychiatry.Trade Review‘Trans America places the recent conversation about trans issues in its historical context, in impressive depth. Sweeping across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Barry Reay provides an accessible yet comprehensive guide to the important people, places and trends, in the USA and beyond – ideal for anyone who wants to understand what came before the “Transgender Tipping Point”.’Juliet Jacques, author of Trans: A Memoir ‘The richly varied nature of the current trans movement is so beautifully explored and uncovered in Barry Reay's new book. A pleasure to read.’Fayette Hauser of The Cockettes ‘This is an admirable contribution to trans history by a highly respected scholar. It is a story of shifting categorizations, often highly medicalized and limiting, but above all a narrative of agency as trans people pushed definitions to the limit, bent them, and broke them and increasingly spoke for themselves in a powerful, if not always singular, voice. It’s a major achievement and deserves to become a classic.’Jeffrey Weeks, London South Bank University ‘This book is of very high quality. Reay is a major scholar in the field and writes with great authority and assurance.’Thomas Laqueur, University of California at Berkeley ‘Trans America is a thoughtfully written and impressively researched treasure trove of resources for those interested in understanding the history of transgender people and ideas in the USA.’Eric Plemons, Social History of Medicine‘Barry Reay is an innovative historian of sexuality with a special talent for finding ‘sex in the archives’… Reay is also a sharp and vivid writer, frequently hitting that sweet spot between scholarly rigour and mainstream accessibility.’History AustraliaTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Introduction 1 Before Trans 2 The Transsexual Moment 3 Blurring the Boundaries 4 Backlash 5 The Transgender Turn Conclusion Notes Index
£41.25
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Science and Religion: An Impossible Dialogue
Book SynopsisToday we hear renewed calls for a dialogue between science and religion: why has the old question of the relations between science and religion now returned to the public domain and what is at stake in this debate? To answer these questions, historian and sociologist of science Yves Gingras retraces the long history of the troubled relationship between science and religion, from the condemnation of Galileo for heresy in 1633 until his rehabilitation by John Paul II in 1992. He reconstructs the process of the gradual separation of science from theology and religion, showing how God and natural theology became marginalized in the scientific field in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast to the dominant trend among historians of science, Gingras argues that science and religion are social institutions that give rise to incompatible ways of knowing, rooted in different methodologies and forms of knowledge, and that there never was, and cannot be, a genuine dialogue between them. Wide-ranging and authoritative, this new book on one of the fundamental questions of Western thought will be of great interest to students and scholars of the history of science and of religion as well as to general readers who are intrigued by the new and much-publicized conversations about the alleged links between science and religion.Trade Review‘In this forceful and fascinating polemic, a leading historian and sociologist of the sciences takes up arms against recent calls for dialogue between science and religion. In a survey of past centuries of conflict, censorship and apologetics, and a telling analysis of modern initiatives to establish new kinds of relations between science and religion, Gingras argues that the sciences have achieved autonomous status by building social organizations not to be reconciled with the claims of faith. This book represents an important and provocative intervention in a debate of great contemporary significance.’Simon Schaffer, Professor of History of Science, University of Cambridge ‘Yves Gingras’ gripping account of four centuries of conflict between religion and science provides a wonderful antidote to the insistent calls for “dialogue”.’Alan Sokal, Professor of Physics, New York University"Science and Religion is a useful corrective to simplistic accounts of the relations between science and religion in the past."William R. Shea in Fides et Historia “The science–religion issue will intrigue us for a long time to come. It is interesting in its own right, but it is also of prime concern to any civilization struggling to get things right. Yves Gingras’s Science and Religion: An Impossible Dialogue has contributed a great deal to a better historical understanding."Metascience Table of ContentsIntroduction1 The Theological Limits of the Autonomy of Science2 Copernicus and Galileo: Thorns in the Sides of Popes3 God: From the Center to the Periphery of Science4 Science Censored5 From Conflict to Dialogue?6 What Is a "Dialogue" Between Science and Religion?7 Belief Versus ScienceConclusion: Betting on ReasonNotesIndex
£49.50
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Science and Religion: An Impossible Dialogue
Book SynopsisToday we hear renewed calls for a dialogue between science and religion: why has the old question of the relations between science and religion now returned to the public domain and what is at stake in this debate? To answer these questions, historian and sociologist of science Yves Gingras retraces the long history of the troubled relationship between science and religion, from the condemnation of Galileo for heresy in 1633 until his rehabilitation by John Paul II in 1992. He reconstructs the process of the gradual separation of science from theology and religion, showing how God and natural theology became marginalized in the scientific field in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast to the dominant trend among historians of science, Gingras argues that science and religion are social institutions that give rise to incompatible ways of knowing, rooted in different methodologies and forms of knowledge, and that there never was, and cannot be, a genuine dialogue between them. Wide-ranging and authoritative, this new book on one of the fundamental questions of Western thought will be of great interest to students and scholars of the history of science and of religion as well as to general readers who are intrigued by the new and much-publicized conversations about the alleged links between science and religion.Trade Review‘In this forceful and fascinating polemic, a leading historian and sociologist of the sciences takes up arms against recent calls for dialogue between science and religion. In a survey of past centuries of conflict, censorship and apologetics, and a telling analysis of modern initiatives to establish new kinds of relations between science and religion, Gingras argues that the sciences have achieved autonomous status by building social organizations not to be reconciled with the claims of faith. This book represents an important and provocative intervention in a debate of great contemporary significance.’Simon Schaffer, Professor of History of Science, University of Cambridge ‘Yves Gingras’ gripping account of four centuries of conflict between religion and science provides a wonderful antidote to the insistent calls for “dialogue”.’Alan Sokal, Professor of Physics, New York University“The science–religion issue will intrigue us for a long time to come. It is interesting in its own right, but it is also of prime concern to any civilization struggling to get things right. Yves Gingras’s Science and Religion: An Impossible Dialogue has contributed a great deal to a better historical understanding."MetascienceTable of Contents Contents Introduction 1 The Theological Limits of the Autonomy of Science 2 Copernicus and Galileo: Thorns in the Sides of Popes 3 God: From the Center to the Periphery of Science 4 Science Censored 5 From Conflict to Dialogue? 6 What Is a "Dialogue" Between Science and Religion? 7 Belief Versus Science Conclusion: Betting on Reason Notes Index
£17.09
John Wiley and Sons Ltd The Empire of Depression: A New History
Book SynopsisDepression has colonized the world. Today, more than 300 million of us have been diagnosed as depressed. But 150 years ago, "depression" referred to a mood, not a sickness. Does that mean people weren't sick before, only sad? Of course not. Mental illness is a complex thing, part biological, part social, its definition dependent on time and place. But in the mid-twentieth century, even as European empires were crumbling, new Western clinical models and treatments for mental health spread across the world. In so doing, "depression" began to displace older ideas like "melancholia," the Japanese "utsushô," or the Punjabi "sinking heart" syndrome. Award-winning historian Jonathan Sadowsky tells this global story, chronicling the path-breaking work of psychiatrists and pharmacists, and the intimate sufferings of patients. Revealing the continuity of human distress across time and place, he shows us how different cultures have experienced intense mental anguish, and how they have tried to alleviate it. He reaches an unflinching conclusion: the devastating effects of depression are real. A number of treatments do reduce suffering, but a permanent cure remains elusive. Throughout the history of depression, there have been overzealous promoters of particular approaches, but history shows us that there is no single way to get better that works for everyone. Like successful psychotherapy, history can liberate us from the negative patterns of the past.Trade Review"Drawing from literature, medicine, psychology, anthropology, and memoir, Jonathan Sadowsky shows how much the history of depression informs our present understanding of it. This is an immensely readable book which challenges dogmatic opinions about a complex condition which may be 'hard to manualize' but, sadly, is also too often politicized."—Linda Gask, writer and psychiatrist "Sadowsky deftly guides the reader across history and continents in search of depression's past, present, and future. Engagingly written, measured in tone, and nuanced in its conclusions, The Empire of Depression never loses sight of the human suffering at the heart of its subject."—Greg Eghigian, editor of The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health "fascinating."—New Statesman "a wise and discerning work."—Shepherd Express "What would an updated Anatomy of Melancholy look like? Perhaps something like Jonathan Sadowsky's The Empire of Depression.... Though neither a Galenist nor an Anglican priest, Sadowsky reminds one in many ways of Burton: wry, practical, humane...."—Gregory Hayes, New York Review of Books "With humour and personal reflexivity, Sadowsky unravels the history of depression in a comprehensive synthesis of a staggering range of sources, weaving classical, medical and academic literature with the tragic stories of prominent people such as artist, Mark Rothko and writer, Sylvia Plath."—Jacqueline Leckie, Health and HistoryTable of ContentsPreface 10 Acknowledgments 19 1 Depression is a Thing 23 2 Too Dry and too Cold 52 3 Turned Inward 79 4 A Diagnosis in Ascent 108 5 "Just Chemical" 152 6 Darkness Legible 187 Epilogue: Depression's Past and Future 216 Note on the Historiography 221 Partial Bibliography 226 Index 232
£21.25
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Insulin: A Hundred-Year History
Book SynopsisIn 1922, an unlikely team of researchers in Toronto made one of the most important medical breakthroughs of the century: insulin. Their discovery seemed miraculous. When it was given to diabetic patients on the brink of death, their condition rapidly improved. Those present could barely believe their eyes: they had witnessed resurrection. However, this was no simple cure. Injections must be taken for life. Without them, symptoms quickly return, often with fatal results. But while a lifetime on insulin poses great challenges, it also offers opportunities. In this revelatory history, Stuart Bradwel looks back on one of medicine’s most celebrated innovations. Setting professional narrative against subjective patient experience, he tells the story of a drug that has challenged many of the basic assumptions upon which medical practice is built, both inside and outside the clinic. Nevertheless, Bradwel reminds us that the centenary of this apparent “wonder drug” should be no cause for celebration. Insulin often remains inaccessible to those who need it most: elusive prescriptions, uneven availability and sky-high prices result in rationing and desperate do-it-yourself research and development. In the face of bootstraps rhetoric and “Pharma Bro” capitalists, patients across the world are left to fend for themselves. There is a long way to go in the twenty-first century until insulin truly fulfils the extraordinary promises made by its discovery.Trade Review‘Bradwel’s Insulin: A Hundred-Year History pierces the veil behind the sanitized mainstream history of the twentieth century’s most celebrated medical breakthrough. What is revealed is that the story of insulin and diabetes has always been a story of class, of struggle, of egos, of money and of patients fighting for care they will quite literally die without. A thorough, well-researched and authoritative work.’James Elliott, #insulin4all activist and diabetes researcher‘A work of wit and passion, Bradwel fuses historical insight and personal experience to produce a sharp analysis of insulin’s complex scientific, medical and political histories within Europe and North America. Connecting past and present, the voices and experiences of people with diabetes alongside clinicians, Insulin: A Hundred-Year History highlights how a life-saving medication remains inextricably intertwined with contested power dynamics, conflicting cultural values and economic structures that continue to produce profound inequalities.’Martin Moore, associate research fellow in medical history at the University of Exeter and author of Managing Diabetes, Managing Medicine‘Bradwel takes his readers through a hundred years of technological progress, the successful extraction and administration of the hormone insulin, while reminding us that technological progress includes multiple actors and assemblages to bring us to our contemporary moment. Insulin highlights a medical treatment that has from its distribution disrupted clinical authority and requires intimate self-care. Insulin is an engaging book that calls attention to the political, social, cultural and economic forces that have led to inequities in access for such an essential and unequalled manufactured hormone.’Samantha Gottlieb, medical anthropologist and author of Not Quite a Cancer Vaccine‘Bradwel’s scientific narrative is accessible and accompanied by intriguing details about the social and cultural history of the disease. The result is a cogent history that also exposes the inadequacy of current medical systems.’Publishers Weekly‘A stinging account … [Bradwel] brings a sharp historical eye to some of the major developments in the field.’The Wall Street JournalTable of ContentsPreface Introduction: What is Insulin and Why Does it Matter? Chapter 1: Toronto, 1921-1923 Chapter 2: Insulin in Practice, 1922-1978 Chapter 3: ‘Intensification’, 1976-1993 Chapter 4: Subjectivity, Paternalism, Neoliberalism, 1993-2002 Chapter 5: The Insulin Crisis, 2002-present Conclusion: Insulin for All? Selected Bibliography
£23.75
John Wiley and Sons Ltd A History of the Wind
Book SynopsisEveryone knows the wind’s touch, its presence, its force. Sometimes it roars and howls, at other times we hear its wistful sighs and feel its soothing caresses. Since antiquity, humans have borne witness to the wind and relied on it to navigate the seas. And yet, despite its presence at the heart of human experience, the wind has evaded scrutiny in our chronicles of the past. In this brilliantly original volume, Alain Corbin sets out to illuminate the wind’s storied history. He shows how, before the nineteenth century, the noisy emptiness of wind was experienced and described only according to the sensations it provoked. Imagery of the wind featured prominently in literature, from the ancient Greek epics through the Renaissance and romanticism to the modern era, but little was known about where the wind came from and where it went. It was only in the late eighteenth century, with the discovery of the composition of air, that scientists began to understand the nature of wind and its trajectories. From that point on, our understanding of the wind was shaped by meteorology, which mapped the flows of winds and currents around the globe. But while science has enabled us to understand the wind and, in some respects, to harness it, the wind has lost nothing of its mysterious force. It still has the power to destroy, and in the wind’s ethereal presence we can still feel its connection with creation and death.Trade Review“The free-wheeling and pioneering imagination of master historian Alain Corbin lends itself to conjuring the history of topics – smell, sound, sensibility, silence, anonymity – seemingly devoid of history. Written with distinctive clarity, insight and erudition, A History of the Wind is a captivating study that will open readers’ sense to the feeling of the past.”Colin Jones, Queen Mary University“Throughout his career, Alain Corbin’s gift has been to reveal the histories of things unseen. At once concise and panoramic, A History of the Wind ranges with Corbin’s characteristic imagination and verve across the arts and sciences as it seeks to understand humanity’s encounter with this ever-present yet elusive phenomenon. William A. Peniston’s translation allows an English-speaking audience to savour this late work from one of France’s greatest living historians.”Robert D. Priest, Royal Holloway, University of London“The wind has figured in many of Alain Corbin’s earlier histories: it carries the sound of bells and of silence, of odors foul and fragrant; it refreshes the air of the seaside. In his newest and most wide-ranging book – from antiquity to the last century – it is the main character: the subject of science, the instrument of God’s wrath, the motor of ships, a terror, a blessing, a wrecker. Less history than the biography of the great sea of air in which we dwell.”Thomas Laqueur, University of California, BerkeleyTable of ContentsTranslator’s Note Acknowledgements Prelude Chapter 1: The Inscrutable Wind Chapter 2: The Winds of the Common Folk Chapter 3: The Aeolian Harp Chapter 4: New Experiences of the Wind The Balloon “At the Head of the Wind” The Sandstorm in the Desert The Wind in the Sequoias Chapter 5: The Tenacity of the Aeolian Imagination in the Bible Chapter 6: The Epic Power of the Wind Chapter 7: The Fantasy of the Wind in the Enlightenment Chapter 8: Gentle Breezes and Caressing Currents Chapter 9: The Enigma of the Wind in the Nineteenth Century Chapter 10: Short Strolls in the Wind of the Twentieth Century Chapter 11: The Wind, the Theater, and Cinema Postlude Notes Index
£13.59
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Freud and Psychoanalysis: Six Introductory
Book SynopsisJohn Forrester’s passionate yet probing engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis is legendary. Here, in six introductory lectures delivered to his students at the University of Cambridge, his range and lucidity bring the evolution of Freud’s thinking and the nature of Freud’s discoveries into sharp focus. With an historian’s eye for context, Forrester explores Freud’s biography, the scientific moment, the radical subject matter of the field itself – sex, dreams, desire, the unconscious, childhood, language – as well as Freud’s development of a new clinical practice. Forrester also explores both the growth of the psychoanalytic movement and the question of what kind of beast it might be as it travels through time and geography. He illuminates the cultural and revolutionary impact of psychoanalytic thinking – not only Freud’s, but that of some of his progeny in the many places where the movement flourished. Freud and Psychoanalysis takes us from Vienna to London, from Paris to New York and Hollywood, from the lab to the couch, to the campus, to film and to literature. This is a slim book that packs a big punch. It invites any curious reader into a field and a way of thinking that shaped the twentieth century.Trade Review"Clear and compelling, these lectures are at once more than accessible and often startlingly informative. In his characteristically lucid and incisive way, Forrester makes Freud new and intriguing. This book is that rare thing: a collection as much for the curious as for the knowledgeable, and the best book on Freud for many years."Adam Phillips“[Psychoanalysis is] our inheritance. It will always be there for us. To understand it, we can do no better than to look to Forrester.”Chronicle of Higher EducationTable of ContentsEditor’s Preface Lisa Appignanesi Foreword Darian Leader Lecture One: A Whole Climate of Opinion Lecture Two: The Historical Foundations of Psychoanalysis Lecture Three: Dreams and Sexuality Lecture Four: Psychoanalysis as a Theory of Culture Lecture Five: Psychoanalysis as a Movement Lecture Six: The Significance of Psychoanalysis in the Twentieth Century Endnotes Further Reading
£37.50
University of Pennsylvania Press The Controversy on the Comets of 1618: Galileo Galilei, Horatio Grassi, Mario Guiducci, Johann Kepler
Book SynopsisThe appearance of three comets in the autumn of 1618 touched off a controversy of such proportions that its effects are still inextricably associated with some of the most dramatic events marking the dawn of our modern era. This volume contains the principal works, in English translation, that were published during the extended controversy between Galileo and the Jesuits over the nature of comets, concluding with a commentary by Johann Kepler. The controversy of of both scientific and philosophical significance because it was in this connection that Galileo disclosed his conception of scientific method, which has been vastly influential on the course of modern thought. The principal work, Il Saggiatore (The Assayer), is also of extraordinary literary merit; it is considered the greatest polemic ever written in the domain of physical science.Trade Review"The authors have . . . placed this gem in its appropriate setting. . . . This excellent contribution to the history of science is much to be recommended." * Nature *Table of ContentsIntroduction —Stillman Drake On the Three Comets of the Year 1618 —Horatio Grassi Discourse on the Comets —Mario Guiducci The Astronomical Balance —Horatio Grassi Letter to Tarquinio Galluzzi —Mario Guiducci The Assayer —Galileo Galilei Appendix to the Hyperaspistes —Johann Kepler Notes Index
£79.20
University of Pennsylvania Press Science as a Cultural Human Right
Book SynopsisThe human right to science, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and repeated in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, recognizes everyone’s right to “share in scientific advancement and its benefits” and to “enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications.” This right also requires state parties to develop and disseminate science, to respect the freedom of scientific research, and to recognize the benefits of international contacts and co-operation in the scientific field. The right to science has never been more important. Even before the COVID-19 health crisis, it was evident that people around the world increasingly rely on science and technology in almost every sphere of their lives from the development of medicines and the treatment of diseases, to transport, agriculture, and the facilitation of global communication. At the same time, however, the value of science has been under attack, with some raising alarm at the emergence of “post-truth” societies. “Dual use” and unintended, because often unforeseen, consequences of emerging technologies are also perceived to be a serious risk. The important role played by science and technology and the potential for dual use makes it imperative to evaluate scientific research and its products not only on their scientific but also on their human rights merits. In Science as a Cultural Human Right, Helle Porsdam argues robustly for the role of the right to science now and in the future. The book analyzes the legal stature of this right, the potential consequences of not establishing it as fundamental, and its connection to global cultural rights. It offers the basis for defending the free and responsible practice of science and ensuring that its benefits are spread globally.Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1. Setting the Scene Chapter 2. The Right to Science as a Cultural Human Right Chapter 3. The Dissemination of Science Chapter 4. Scientific Freedom Chapter 5. The Right to Science and International Cooperation and Solidarity Chapter 6. Of Human Rights, Human Duties, and Science Diplomacy Conclusion Notes Index
£41.65
University of Pennsylvania Press The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in
Book SynopsisIs plot a line, an arc, or a shape? None of these. Rather than thinking of plot as a sequence of events or actions put into place solely through human agency against the backdrop of setting, this book questions why we should distinguish between plot and setting—and indeed, whether we can make such a distinction. After all, plot, Yoon Sun Lee contends, cannot be disentangled from the material setting in which it takes place. In The Natural Laws of Plot, Lee connects the history of the novel and the history of science to show how plot in the realist novel is given shape by the characteristics of the physical world—and how in turn, plot serves as the avenue through which the realist novel participates in the same lines of inquiry about the world as pursued by the natural and physical sciences. Lee argues that the novel emerges and evolves in tandem with the development of scientific practices and concepts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe to investigate the idea of a unified and objective world. Drawing on readings from Defoe, Austen, Scott, and many others, Lee demonstrates how bodies, human and non-human, behave according to laws that are built into worlds by plot, and how they are subject to causes and consequences that can occur independently of individual action, social forces, or metaphysical destiny. This interest in representing and exploring how things happen sets the novel apart from other literary genres, and makes the history of science integral to the understanding of the history and theory of the novel, and of narrative. Plot, Lee shows us, is immersive and powerful, because it satisfies our wish to know how things happen in a coherent, objective, and possibly real world.Trade Review"The Natural Laws of Plot adds to a growing slate of new materialist accounts of the eighteenth century and of the novel, yet it does so in a way that excitingly resuscitates plot—too often ignored or reduced to mere human action at the exclusion of the uncountable actions and reactions of the world. In grounding plot in the eighteenth century’s evolving notion of objectivity, Lee offers a fresh and convincing perspective on the capaciousness and complexity of plot." * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *"[An] impressive book...In its scope, its research, its originality, it is an important paving stone, so to speak, in our understanding of the novel. Lee’s book disarticulates plot from narrative and character, but she does not leave us with a macerated skeleton: plot is fused, living, into description and motion, matter and space, shaped by the forces that were seen shaping the (shall we say it?) real world." * Modern Philology *"[An] ingenious study...Lee shows herself well versed in contemporary narratology, but in developing this counter-history of plot, she sets to one side the uses of contemporary cognitive psychology for analyzing how plots are recognized and valued. Instead, she works in a historicistmode, explaining how a whole series of scientific models informed the thought experiments proffered by realist fiction...[O]ur histories and theories of the British novel, of realism, of plot, and of literature and science will stand greatly enriched by this study, to which all those working in those broad and interconnected fields should attend." * The Wordsworth Circle *"Ambitiously conceived and persuasively argued, The Natural Laws of Plot shows how, over a crucial century or more of British and Irish fiction, developments in experimental science came to shape the representation of action in the realist novel." * James Chandler, University of Chicago *
£49.30
University of Pennsylvania Press Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists,
Book SynopsisJapan is a place where powerful earthquakes have occurred more frequently and have caused more harm in the modern era than they have in all but a handful of other locations on the planet. In the twentieth century alone, earthquake disasters in Japan took almost as many lives as they had in all of the country’s recorded history up to that point. Predicting Disasters is the first English-language book to explore how scientists convinced policy makers and the public in postwar Japan that catastrophic earthquakes were coming, and the first to show why earthquake prediction has played such a central role in Japan’s efforts to prepare for a dangerous future ever since. Kerry Smith shows how, in the twentieth century, scientists struggled to make large-scale earthquake disasters legible to the public and to policy makers as significant threats to Japan’s future and as phenomena that could be anticipated and prepared for. Smith also explains why understanding those struggles matters. Disasters, Smith contends, belong alongside more familiar topics of analysis in modern Japanese history—such as economic growth and its impacts, political crises and popular protest, and even the legacies of the war—for the work they do in helping us better understand how the past has influenced beliefs about Japan’s possible futures, and how beliefs about the future shape the present. Predicting Disasters makes relevant elements of Japan’s past more accessible to readers interested in the histories of disaster and scientific communities, as well as to those who want to gain a better understanding of the risk and uncertainty surrounding natural phenomena.Trade Review"An authoritative study that documents far more than Japan’s chimerical quest to master earthquake prediction. Kerry Smith beautifully illustrates how seismic vulnerability and risk, science and speculation, personal ambition and politics, anticipation and fear, have all shaped Japan’s modern approach to earthquakes and thus the nation we know today. Innovative, imaginative, and provocative, Predicting Disasters is a thoroughly compelling read." * J. Charles Schencking, author of The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan *"Kerry Smith masterfully narrates the ways in which Japanese seismologists’ promise of earthquake prediction have played out against the geological reality and socioeconomic conditions of Japan since the late nineteenth century. Predicting Disasters is not only an excellent history of Japanese seismology but also a vivid testimony to the fact that paradigm shifts in science can be a gradual and arduous process." * Yoshikuni Igarashi, author of Japan, 1972: Visions of Masculinity in an Age of Mass Consumerism *
£49.30
University of Minnesota Press How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement,
Book SynopsisAn engrossing history of the century that transformed our knowledge of the body’s inner senses The years between 1833 and 1945 fundamentally transformed science’s understanding of the body’s inner senses, revolutionizing fields like philosophy, the social sciences, and cognitive science. In How We Became Sensorimotor, Mark Paterson provides a systematic account of this transformative period, while also demonstrating its substantial implications for current explorations into phenomenology, embodied consciousness, the extended mind, and theories of the sensorimotor, the body, and embodiment.Each chapter of How We Became Sensorimotor takes a particular sense and historicizes its formation by means of recent scientific studies, case studies, or coverage in the media. Ranging among a diverse array of sensations, including balance, fatigue, pain, the “muscle sense,” and what Maurice Merleau-Ponty termed “motricity,” Paterson’s analysis moves outward from the familiar confines of the laboratory to those of the industrial world and even to wild animals and their habitats. He uncovers important stories, such as how forgotten pain-measurement schemes transformed criminology, or how Penfield’s outmoded concepts of the sensory and motor homunculi of the brain still mar psychology textbooks.Complete with original archival research featuring illustrations and correspondence, How We Became Sensorimotor shows how the shifting and sometimes contested historical background to our understandings of the senses are being extended even today.Trade Review"Opening a new chapter in the archaeology of knowledge and the body, How We Became Sensorimotor charts how the inchoate mass of sensations within the bodily interior became the focus of increasingly intensive scientific inquiry from the mid-1800s onwards. To read this deeply touching book is to come to know one’s innermost self from a rigorously empirical and objective yet intimately familiar angle."—David Howes, author of The Sensory Studies Manifesto"Through rigorous archival research and fieldwork, Mark Paterson meticulously documents the historical practices that made the ‘sensorimotor’ body a thinkable concept. Crisscrossing neurology, experimental physiology, phenomenology, and chronophotography, How We Become Sensorimotor tells the fascinating story of the academic disciplines and artistic worlds that lodged internal sensations at the core of what it means to be a body."—Erica Fretwell, author of Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of FeelingTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: From Nineteenth-Century Physiology to Twenty-First-Century Neuroprosthesis1. The “Muscle Sense” and the Motor Cortex: A Cartography of Bodily Interiority2. On Pain as a Distinct Sensation: Weber, Fechner, and the Instruments of Measure3. The Oculomotor: Labyrinths, Vestibules, and Chambers4. “The Neuro-motor Unconscious”: Étienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and Motion Capture5. Fatigue: Jules Amar, Angelo Mosso, and Physiological Observations of Industrial Labor, 1891–19476. Motricity: Merleau-Ponty and the Neurophysiology of MovementAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex
£80.00
University of Minnesota Press How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement,
Book SynopsisAn engrossing history of the century that transformed our knowledge of the body’s inner senses The years between 1833 and 1945 fundamentally transformed science’s understanding of the body’s inner senses, revolutionizing fields like philosophy, the social sciences, and cognitive science. In How We Became Sensorimotor, Mark Paterson provides a systematic account of this transformative period, while also demonstrating its substantial implications for current explorations into phenomenology, embodied consciousness, the extended mind, and theories of the sensorimotor, the body, and embodiment.Each chapter of How We Became Sensorimotor takes a particular sense and historicizes its formation by means of recent scientific studies, case studies, or coverage in the media. Ranging among a diverse array of sensations, including balance, fatigue, pain, the “muscle sense,” and what Maurice Merleau-Ponty termed “motricity,” Paterson’s analysis moves outward from the familiar confines of the laboratory to those of the industrial world and even to wild animals and their habitats. He uncovers important stories, such as how forgotten pain-measurement schemes transformed criminology, or how Penfield’s outmoded concepts of the sensory and motor homunculi of the brain still mar psychology textbooks.Complete with original archival research featuring illustrations and correspondence, How We Became Sensorimotor shows how the shifting and sometimes contested historical background to our understandings of the senses are being extended even today.Trade Review"Opening a new chapter in the archaeology of knowledge and the body, How We Became Sensorimotor charts how the inchoate mass of sensations within the bodily interior became the focus of increasingly intensive scientific inquiry from the mid-1800s onwards. To read this deeply touching book is to come to know one’s innermost self from a rigorously empirical and objective yet intimately familiar angle."—David Howes, author of The Sensory Studies Manifesto"Through rigorous archival research and fieldwork, Mark Paterson meticulously documents the historical practices that made the ‘sensorimotor’ body a thinkable concept. Crisscrossing neurology, experimental physiology, phenomenology, and chronophotography, How We Become Sensorimotor tells the fascinating story of the academic disciplines and artistic worlds that lodged internal sensations at the core of what it means to be a body."—Erica Fretwell, author of Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of FeelingTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: From Nineteenth-Century Physiology to Twenty-First-Century Neuroprosthesis1. The “Muscle Sense” and the Motor Cortex: A Cartography of Bodily Interiority2. On Pain as a Distinct Sensation: Weber, Fechner, and the Instruments of Measure3. The Oculomotor: Labyrinths, Vestibules, and Chambers4. “The Neuro-motor Unconscious”: Étienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and Motion Capture5. Fatigue: Jules Amar, Angelo Mosso, and Physiological Observations of Industrial Labor, 1891–19476. Motricity: Merleau-Ponty and the Neurophysiology of MovementAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex
£21.59
University of North Texas Press,U.S. Tracing Darwin's Path in Cape Horn
Book SynopsisCharles Darwin spent the majority of his 1831–1836 voyage around the world in southern South America, and his early experiences in the Cape Horn region seem to have triggered his first ideas on human evolution. Darwin was not only a field naturalist, but also a scholar of the observations of the European explorers who preceded him.Richly illustrated with maps and color photographs, this book offers a guide to the sites visited by Darwin, and a compass for present-day visitors who can follow Darwin’s path over the sea and land that today are protected by the UNESCO Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve.
£37.46
Crossway Books Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach
Book SynopsisWe live in God's world, and today this world is continually experiencing the impact of science, scientific ideas, and technological fruits of science. So if this is God's world, then how does God relate to science?
£999.99
American Philosophical Society Press Spirit of Inquiry in the Age of Jefferson:
Book Synopsis
£40.50
Purdue University Press Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues: How Microbes, War, and Public Health Shaped Animal Health
Book SynopsisPioneer Science and the Great Plagues covers the century when infectious plagues - anthrax, tuberculosis, tetanus, plague, smallpox, and polio - were conquered, and details the important role that veterinary scientists played. The narrative is driven by astonishing events that centered on animal disease: the influenza pandemic of 1872, discovery of the causes of anthrax and tuberculosis in the 1880s, conquest of Texas cattle fever and then yellow fever, German anthrax attacks on the United States during World War I, the tuberculin war of 1931, Japanese biological warfare in the 1940s, and today's bioterror dangers. Veterinary science in the rural Midwest arose from agriculture, but in urban Philadelphia it came from medicine; similar differences occurred in Canada between Toronto and Montreal. As land-grant colleges were established after the American Civil War, individual states followed divergent pathways in supporting veterinary science. Some employed a trade school curriculum that taught agriculturalists to empirically treat animal diseases and others emphasized a curriculum tied to science. This pattern continued for a century, but today some institutions have moved back to the trade school philosophy. Avoiding lessons of the 1910 Flexner Report on medical education reform, university-associated veterinary schools are being approved that do not have control of their own veterinary hospitals, diagnostic laboratories, and research institutes - components that are critical for training students in science. Underlying this change were twin idiosyncrasies of culture - disbelief in science and distrust of government - that spawned scientology, creationism, anti-vaccination movements, and other anti-science scams. As new infectious plagues continue to arise, Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues details the strategies we learned defeating plagues from 1860 to 1960 - and the essential role veterinary science played. To defeat the plagues of today it is essential we avoid the digital cocoon of disbelief in science and cultural stasis now threatening progress.Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgments Part I. Prologue 1. The Veterinary Schools of Europe 2. Edward Jenner: Zoologist, Physician, Pioneer 3. William Dick: From Farrier to Veterinarian in Edinburgh 4. The Science Giants of 1860: Pasteur, Virchow, and Darwin 5. Robert Koch: Game Change Part II. Farrier to Veterinarian 6. Emigrants West: Ohio Country, Iowa Territory, and Tejas 7. The Canadian Midwest: Divergence of Lower and Upper Canada 8. Pioneers in the Midwest Frontier: Physicians in Veterinary Practice 9. New Plagues, Civil War, and the United States Department of Agriculture 10. Agriculture and Veterinary Science in the Midwest Part III. Pioneering Veterinary Education 11. Urban East Versus Rural West: Montreal and New York Diss Toronto and Iowa 12. The Pioneer State Colleges: Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Cornell 13. Plagues and the Bureau of Animal Industry 14. Bacteriology in the Heartland 15. The 1890s: Horse Markets and Enrollments Drop Part iv. Livestock and Veterinarians Go West 16. Private Veterinary Schools: Chicago, Kansas City, and Indianapolis 17. Public Veterinary Schools: The Second-Generation Pioneers 18. The Bureau of Animal Industry and Hog Cholera 19. Veterinary Education, Charles Stange, and the Flexner Report 20. World War I: Biowarfare, Prejudice, and the U.S. ArmyVeterinary Corps Part v. Ascendance 21. Agricultural Depression Amidst a National Boom: The 1920s 22. 1929: Prelude to Bad Times 23. Public Health and Distrust of Government: The Tuberculin War 24. A Depression Paradox: Culture and Science 25. New Deal: Discoveries in Infectious Disease Part vi. Duty Required 26. War: The Home Front 27. Veterinary Corps and Bioterror 28. Postwar Investigations of Enemy Biological Warfare 29. Prelude to the Science Revolution 30. The Atomic Age Part vii. Transformation 31. New Programs, New Laboratories: Malaria, Polio, and New Viruses 32. Comparative Medicine: Models for Leukemia 33. Grassroots Mandates: The National Research Centers for Livestock Diseases 34. Old Plagues in the Wild: The National Wildlife Centers 35. New Plagues: Scrapie, Mad Cow Disease, and the Prion Part VIII. Epilogue 36. The Farm Crises of 1980–1995: Distrust of Science 37. The Gender Shift 38. Biopolitics 39. Bioterror, Anthrax, and the National Animal Health Networks 40. Anti-Science Scams and Keys to Progress Appendixes Notes Index
£999.99
Purdue University Press Reginald Sutcliffe and the Invention of Modern Weather Systems Science
Book SynopsisDespite being perhaps the foremost British meteorologist of the twentieth century, Reginald Sutcliffe has been understudied and underappreciated. His impact continues to this day every time you check the weather forecast. Reginald Sutcliffe and the Invention of Modern Weather Systems Science not only details Sutcliffe's life and ideas, but it also illuminates the impact of social movements and the larger forces that propelled him on his consequential trajectory. Less than a century ago, a forecast of the weather tomorrow was considered a practical impossibility. This book makes the case that three important advances guided the development of modern dynamic meteorology, which led directly to the astounding progress in weather forecasting-and that Sutcliffe was the pioneer in all three of these foundational developments: the application of the quasi-geostrophic simplification to the equations governing atmospheric behavior, adoption of pressure as the vertical coordinate in analysis, and development of a diagnostic equation for vertical air motions. Shining a light on Sutcliffe's life and work will, hopefully, inspire a renewed appreciation for the human dimension in scientific progress and the rich legacy bequeathed to societies wise enough to fully embrace investments in education and basic research. As climate change continues to grow more dire, modern extensions of Sutcliffe's innovations increasingly offer some of the best tools we have for peering into the long-term future of our environment.Table of Contents PREFACE INTRODUCTION: The Waiting CHAPTER 1. Background CHAPTER 2. The Education of Reginald Sutcliffe CHAPTER 3. An Unexpected Career: The Meteorological Office CHAPTER 4. Forging a Reputation: Meteorology for Aviators and a Theory on Development CHAPTER 5. The War Years: Crucible of Advance CHAPTER 6. Homecoming and the Development Theorem CHAPTER 7. Director of Research and the Development of Numerical Weather Prediction CHAPTER 8. The Emergence of an International Figure CHAPTER 9. Professor Sutcliffe: The Reading Years CHAPTER 10. An Active Retirement CHAPTER 11. Reflection and Twilight ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX
£73.10
Purdue University Press Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues: How
Book SynopsisPioneer Science and the Great Plagues covers the century when infectious plagues - anthrax, tuberculosis, tetanus, plague, smallpox, and polio - were conquered, and details the important role that veterinary scientists played. The narrative is driven by astonishing events that centered on animal disease: the influenza pandemic of 1872, discovery of the causes of anthrax and tuberculosis in the 1880s, conquest of Texas cattle fever and then yellow fever, German anthrax attacks on the United States during World War I, the tuberculin war of 1931, Japanese biological warfare in the 1940s, and today's bioterror dangers. Veterinary science in the rural Midwest arose from agriculture, but in urban Philadelphia it came from medicine; similar differences occurred in Canada between Toronto and Montreal. As land-grant colleges were established after the American Civil War, individual states followed divergent pathways in supporting veterinary science. Some employed a trade school curriculum that taught agriculturalists to empirically treat animal diseases and others emphasized a curriculum tied to science. This pattern continued for a century, but today some institutions have moved back to the trade school philosophy. Avoiding lessons of the 1910 Flexner Report on medical education reform, university-associated veterinary schools are being approved that do not have control of their own veterinary hospitals, diagnostic laboratories, and research institutes - components that are critical for training students in science. Underlying this change were twin idiosyncrasies of culture - disbelief in science and distrust of government - that spawned scientology, creationism, anti-vaccination movements, and other anti-science scams. As new infectious plagues continue to arise, Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues details the strategies we learned defeating plagues from 1860 to 1960 - and the essential role veterinary science played. To defeat the plagues of today it is essential we avoid the digital cocoon of disbelief in science and cultural stasis now threatening progress.Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgments Part I. Prologue 1. The Veterinary Schools of Europe 2. Edward Jenner: Zoologist, Physician, Pioneer 3. William Dick: From Farrier to Veterinarian in Edinburgh 4. The Science Giants of 1860: Pasteur, Virchow, and Darwin 5. Robert Koch: Game Change Part II. Farrier to Veterinarian 6. Emigrants West: Ohio Country, Iowa Territory, and Tejas 7. The Canadian Midwest: Divergence of Lower and Upper Canada 8. Pioneers in the Midwest Frontier: Physicians in Veterinary Practice 9. New Plagues, Civil War, and the United States Department of Agriculture 10. Agriculture and Veterinary Science in the Midwest Part III. Pioneering Veterinary Education 11. Urban East Versus Rural West: Montreal and New York Diss Toronto and Iowa 12. The Pioneer State Colleges: Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Cornell 13. Plagues and the Bureau of Animal Industry 14. Bacteriology in the Heartland 15. The 1890s: Horse Markets and Enrollments Drop Part iv. Livestock and Veterinarians Go West 16. Private Veterinary Schools: Chicago, Kansas City, and Indianapolis 17. Public Veterinary Schools: The Second-Generation Pioneers 18. The Bureau of Animal Industry and Hog Cholera 19. Veterinary Education, Charles Stange, and the Flexner Report 20. World War I: Biowarfare, Prejudice, and the U.S. ArmyVeterinary Corps Part v. Ascendance 21. Agricultural Depression Amidst a National Boom: The 1920s 22. 1929: Prelude to Bad Times 23. Public Health and Distrust of Government: The Tuberculin War 24. A Depression Paradox: Culture and Science 25. New Deal: Discoveries in Infectious Disease Part vi. Duty Required 26. War: The Home Front 27. Veterinary Corps and Bioterror 28. Postwar Investigations of Enemy Biological Warfare 29. Prelude to the Science Revolution 30. The Atomic Age Part vii. Transformation 31. New Programs, New Laboratories: Malaria, Polio, and New Viruses 32. Comparative Medicine: Models for Leukemia 33. Grassroots Mandates: The National Research Centers for Livestock Diseases 34. Old Plagues in the Wild: The National Wildlife Centers 35. New Plagues: Scrapie, Mad Cow Disease, and the Prion Part VIII. Epilogue 36. The Farm Crises of 1980–1995: Distrust of Science 37. The Gender Shift 38. Biopolitics 39. Bioterror, Anthrax, and the National Animal Health Networks 40. Anti-Science Scams and Keys to Progress Appendixes Notes Index
£73.10
Purdue University Press Jews and Science
Book SynopsisJews and Science examines the complicated relationship between Jewish identities and the evolving meanings of science throughout the history of Western academic culture. Jews have been not only the agents for study of things Jewish, but also the subject of examination by "scientists" across a range of disciplines, from biology and bioethics to anthropology and genetics. Even the most recent iteration of Jewish studies as an academic discipline—Israel studies—stresses the global cultural, economic, and social impact of Israeli science and medicine.The 2022 volume of the Casden Institute's Jewish Role in American Life series tackles a range of issues that have evolved with the rise of Jewish studies, throughout its evolution from interdisciplinary to transdisciplinary, and now finally as a discipline itself with its own degrees and departments in universities across the world. This book gathers contributions by scholars from various disciplines to discuss the complexity in defining "science" across multiple fields within Jewish studies. The scholars examine the role of the self-defined "Jewish" scholar, discerning if their identification with the object of study (whether that study be economics, criminology, medicine, or another field entirely) changes their perception or status as scientists. They interrogate whether the myriad ways to study Jews and their relationship to science—including the role of Jews in science and scientific training, the science of the Jews (however defined), and Jews as objects of scientific study—alter our understanding of science itself. The contributors of Jews and Science take on the challenge to confront these central problems.Table of Contents FOREWORD EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION DEFINING SCIENCE; DEFINING JEWS Science, Imperialism, and Heteromasculinity in the Wissenschaft des Judentums, by Susannah Heschel Philosophers of Catastrophe: Early Twentieth-Century Jewish Proponents and Opponents of Objectivity in Science, by Steven Gimbel and Stephen Stern Medical History: A Blank Spot in Jewish Studies?, by Robert Jütte Jewish Scientists and Scholars at the University of Vienna from the Late Habsburg Period until the Early Post-War Years, by Mitchell G. Ash HUMAN BIOLOGY: GENETICS IN THE NOW "Questions Remain": Racialism, Geneticism, and the Continuing Lure of Jewish Essentialism, by Mitchell B. Hart Science, Sovereignty, and Diaspora: Alternative Genealogies and DNA Research on Jewish Populations, by Yulia Egorova ISRAEL STUDIES AND SCIENCE The Fusion of Zionism and Science: The First Two Decades—and the Present Day?, by Amos Morris-Reich and Danny Trom Israel as a Laboratory in the Time of COVID-19, by Sander L. Gilman JEWS AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE Environmental History and Jewish Studies: Methodological Intersections and Opportunities, by Dean Phillip Bell Changing Climates: Zionist Medical Climatology in Palestine, 1897–1948, by Netta Cohen ISRAEL STUDIES AND SCIENCE Jews and Science: A Note, by David A. Hollinger Science and Judaism, by Roald Hoffmann ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS ABOUT THE USC CASDEN INSTITUTE
£73.10
Purdue University Press Jews and Science
Book SynopsisJews and Science examines the complicated relationship between Jewish identities and the evolving meanings of science throughout the history of Western academic culture. Jews have been not only the agents for study of things Jewish, but also the subject of examination by "scientists" across a range of disciplines, from biology and bioethics to anthropology and genetics. Even the most recent iteration of Jewish studies as an academic discipline—Israel studies—stresses the global cultural, economic, and social impact of Israeli science and medicine.The 2022 volume of the Casden Institute's Jewish Role in American Life series tackles a range of issues that have evolved with the rise of Jewish studies, throughout its evolution from interdisciplinary to transdisciplinary, and now finally as a discipline itself with its own degrees and departments in universities across the world. This book gathers contributions by scholars from various disciplines to discuss the complexity in defining "science" across multiple fields within Jewish studies. The scholars examine the role of the self-defined "Jewish" scholar, discerning if their identification with the object of study (whether that study be economics, criminology, medicine, or another field entirely) changes their perception or status as scientists. They interrogate whether the myriad ways to study Jews and their relationship to science—including the role of Jews in science and scientific training, the science of the Jews (however defined), and Jews as objects of scientific study—alter our understanding of science itself. The contributors of Jews and Science take on the challenge to confront these central problems.Table of Contents FOREWORD EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION DEFINING SCIENCE; DEFINING JEWS Science, Imperialism, and Heteromasculinity in the Wissenschaft des Judentums, by Susannah Heschel Philosophers of Catastrophe: Early Twentieth-Century Jewish Proponents and Opponents of Objectivity in Science, by Steven Gimbel and Stephen Stern Medical History: A Blank Spot in Jewish Studies?, by Robert Jütte Jewish Scientists and Scholars at the University of Vienna from the Late Habsburg Period until the Early Post-War Years, by Mitchell G. Ash HUMAN BIOLOGY: GENETICS IN THE NOW "Questions Remain": Racialism, Geneticism, and the Continuing Lure of Jewish Essentialism, by Mitchell B. Hart Science, Sovereignty, and Diaspora: Alternative Genealogies and DNA Research on Jewish Populations, by Yulia Egorova ISRAEL STUDIES AND SCIENCE The Fusion of Zionism and Science: The First Two Decades—and the Present Day?, by Amos Morris-Reich and Danny Trom Israel as a Laboratory in the Time of COVID-19, by Sander L. Gilman JEWS AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE Environmental History and Jewish Studies: Methodological Intersections and Opportunities, by Dean Phillip Bell Changing Climates: Zionist Medical Climatology in Palestine, 1897–1948, by Netta Cohen ISRAEL STUDIES AND SCIENCE Jews and Science: A Note, by David A. Hollinger Science and Judaism, by Roald Hoffmann ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS ABOUT THE USC CASDEN INSTITUTE
£36.51
Purdue University Press Alexander von Humboldt: Perceiving the World
Book SynopsisAlexander von Humboldt: Perceiving the World provides an interdisciplinary exploration into Humboldt's approach to seeing and describing the many subjects he pursued. Though remembered primarily as an environmental thinker, Humboldt's interests were vast and documented not just in his published works, but also in his extensive correspondence with scientists, artists, poets, and philosophers internationally. Perceiving the World covers Humboldt's perceptions during intercontinental travels and scientific discoveries, as well as how he visualized nature, geography, environments, and diverse cultures, including Indigenous Peoples.This collection draws heavily on the English translations of Humboldt's work housed in the Purdue University Archives, which were collected by John Purdue. The book is divided into three parts: Humboldt's contributions to science since the nineteenth century; his work on nature, climates, environments, and the cosmos; and his lasting cultural impact, including his imaging techniques, modes of visual presentation, and contributions to the arts. Humboldt's intricate approach to perception still resonates today, as his nuanced and unique way of seeing the world was just as important as what he wrote.
£36.51
The Experiment LLC The Philadelphia Chromosome
Book Synopsis
£11.99
University of Massachusetts Press Storytelling and Science: Rewriting Oppenheimer
Book SynopsisNo single figure embodies Cold War science more than the renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Although other scientists may have been more influential in establishing the institutions and policies of the nuclear age, none has loomed larger in the popular imagination than the “father of the atomic bomb.” Americans have been drawn to the story of the Manhattan Project Oppenheimer helped lead and riveted by the McCarthy-era politics that caught him in its crosshairs. Journalists and politicians, writers and artists have told Oppenheimer's story in many different ways since he first gained notoriety in 1945. In Storytelling and Science, David K. Hecht examines why they did so, and what they hoped to achieve through their stories.From the outset, accounts of Oppenheimer's life and work were deployed for multiple ends: to trumpet or denigrate the value of science, to settle old scores or advocate new policies, to register dissent or express anxieties. In these different renditions, Oppenheimer was alternately portrayed as hero and villain, establishment figure and principled outsider, “destroyer of worlds” and humanist critic. Yet beneath the varying details of these stories, Hecht discerns important patterns in the way that audiences interpret, and often misinterpret, news about science. In the end, he argues, we find that science itself has surprisingly little to do with how its truths are assimilated by the public. Instead its meaning is shaped by narrative traditions and myths that frame how we think and write about it.
£999.99
Purdue Scholarly Publishing Services First in the Field: Breaking Ground in Computer
Book SynopsisFirst in the Field: Breaking Ground in Computer Science at Purdue University chronicles the history and development of the first computer science department established at a university in the United States. The backdrop for this groundbreaking academic achievement is Purdue in the 1950s when mathematicians, statisticians, engineers, and scientists from various departments were searching for faster and more efficient ways to conduct their research. These were fertile times, as recognized by Purdue’s President Frederick L. Hovde, whose support of what was to become the first “university-centered” computer center in America laid the foundation for the nation’s first department of computer science.The book pulls together strands of the story from previously unpublished texts and photographs, as well as published articles and interviews, to provide the first complete historical account of the genesis of the Department of Computer Sciences at Purdue, and its continued growth up to the present. It is a fascinating story with parallels to the “space race,” involving many players, some of whose contributions have gone previously unacknowledged in the heat of the race. Filled with unique historical anecdotes detailing the challenges of legitimizing the new academic field, these stories bring to life the strong convictions of a group of pioneering thinkers that continue to resonate for us today. The raw determination required to transform a computing laboratory that offered early programming courses into a full-fledged computer center and a department offering degrees in computer science characterizes this story of interest to anyone intrigued by the pathways creativity takes in scientific endeavors. It is a story that matters because it was, and is, an ongoing achievement of leadership in education and research in a field that has totally revolutionized our society.Table of Contents Foreword Introduction Chapter 1: Between the Fields Chapter 2: Breaking Ground Chapter 3: Planting the Seed Chapter 4: Metamorphosis Chapter 5: Growing Pains Chapter 6: The Flowering Chapter 7: The Future Chapter 8: Epilogue Department of Computer Sciences People First in the Field: Acknowledgments
£23.36
