Books

Total 137 results found.

A New Order of Medicine

A New Order of Medicine

The Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg
The sixteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the number of educated physicians practicing in German cities. Concentrating on Nuremberg, A New Order of Medicine follows the intertwined careers of municipal physicians as they encountered the challenges of the Reformation city for the first time. Although conservative in their professed ...
Mechanism

Mechanism

A Visual, Lexical, and Conceptual History
The mechanical philosophy first emerged as a leading player on the intellectual scene in the early modern period—seeking to explain all natural phenomena through the physics of matter and motion—and the term mechanism was coined. Over time, natural phenomena came to be understood through machine analogies and explanations ...
Entangled Itineraries

Entangled Itineraries

Materials, Practices, and Knowledges across Eurasia
Edited By Pamela H. Smith
Trade flowed across Eurasia, around the Indian Ocean, and over the Mediterranean for millennia, but in the early modern period, larger parts of the globe became connected through these established trade routes. Knowledge, embodied in various people, materials, texts, objects, and practices, also moved and came together along these routes ...
The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 6

The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 6

The Correspondence, November 1856-February 1859
This sixth volume of Tyndall’s correspondence contains 302 letters covering a period of twenty-eight months (1856-1859). It begins shortly after Tyndall returned from his first glacier research in the Alps and follows him as he experimented and lectured on physics in central London at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (...
Drugs on the Page

Drugs on the Page

Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World
In the early modern Atlantic World, pharmacopoeias—official lists of medicaments and medicinal preparations published by municipal, national, or imperial governments—organized the world of healing goods, giving rise to new and valuable medical commodities such as cinchona bark, guaiacum, and ipecac. Pharmacopoeias and related texts, developed by governments and ...
Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics and the Average Men of Science, 1796-1874

Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics and the Average Men of Science, 1796-1874

Adolphe Quetelet was an influential astronomer and statistician whose controversial work inspired heated debate in European and American intellectual circles. In creating a science designed to explain the “average man,” he helped contribute to the idea of normal, most enduringly in his creation of the Quetelet Index, which came to ...
Anxious Times

Anxious Times

Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Much like the Information Age of the twenty-first century, the Industrial Age was a period of great social changes brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization, speed of travel, and global communications. The literature, medicine, science, and popular journalism of the nineteenth century attempted to diagnose problems of the mind ...
Destined for the Stars

Destined for the Stars

Faith, the Future, and America's Final Frontier
Where did humanity get the idea that outer space is a frontier waiting to be explored? Destined for the Stars unravels the popularization of the science of space exploration in America between 1944 and 1955, arguing that the success of the US space program was due not to technological or economic superiority, ...
Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life

Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life

Organic Vitality in Germany around 1800
Attempts to distinguish a science of life at the turn of the nineteenth century faced a number of challenges. A central difficulty was clearly demarcating the living from the nonliving experimentally and conceptually. The more closely the boundaries between organic and inorganic phenomena were examined, the more they expanded and ...
Working with Paper

Working with Paper

Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge
Working with Paper builds on a growing interest in the materials of science by exploring the gendered uses and meanings of paper tools and technologies, considering how notions of gender impacted paper practices and in turn how paper may have structured knowledge about gender. Through a series of dynamic investigations ...
The Life and Legend of James Watt

The Life and Legend of James Watt

Collaboration, Natural Philosophy, and the Improvement of the Steam Engine
The Life and Legend of James Watt offers a deeper understanding of the work and character of the great eighteenth-century engineer. Stripping away layers of legend built over generations, David Philip Miller finds behind the heroic engineer a conflicted man often diffident about his achievements but also ruthless in protecting ...
Solid State Insurrection

Solid State Insurrection

How the Science of Substance Made American Physics Matter
Solid state physics, the study of the physical properties of solid matter, was the most populous subfield of Cold War American physics. Despite prolific contributions to consumer and medical technology, such as the transistor and magnetic resonance imaging, it garnered less professional prestige and public attention than nuclear and particle ...
News from Mars

News from Mars

Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910
Mass media in the late nineteenth century was full of news from Mars. In the wake of Giovanni Schiaparelli’s 1877 discovery of enigmatic dark, straight lines on the red planet, astronomers and the public at large vigorously debated the possibility that it might be inhabited. As rivalling scientific practitioners looked ...
From Commodification to the Common Good

From Commodification to the Common Good

Reconstructing Science, Technology, and Society
The commodification of science—often identified with commercialization, or the selling of expertise and research results and the “capitalization of knowledge” in academia and beyond—has been investigated as a threat to the autonomy of science and academic culture and criticized for undermining the social responsibility of modern science. In ...
World’s Fairs in the Cold War

World’s Fairs in the Cold War

Science, Technology, and the Culture of Progress
The post–World War II science-based technological revolution inevitably found its way into almost all international expositions with displays on atomic energy, space exploration, transportation, communications, and computers. Major advancements in Cold War science and technology helped to shape new visions of utopian futures, the stock-in-trade of world’s fairs. ...

Total 137 results found.