• Monday Series: A Disease with no Remedy I

    Introduction: Confronting Hereditary Phthisis, 1714-1830 “What is then to be done? Has Nature been so unkind, particularly to the inhabitants of this island, as to afflict us with a disease for which there is no remedy?” -Philip Stern, Medical Advice to the Consumptive and Asthmatic People of England, 1776. The history of tuberculosis has often… Continue Reading

  • VISUALS & REPRESENTATIONS: Giant’s Shoulders #28

    VISUALIZING SCIENCE David Bressan discusses the value of scientific caricatures,especially those by English geologist Henry De la Beche (1796-1855), in both revealing and teaching aspects of the history of geology. Michael Barton also discusses cartoons and caricatures representing Darwin of evolution (in its various forms). He remarks on how evolution was used as a means to comment on society… Continue Reading

  • Carnival!

    Send in your posts! Visuals and Representations! Science in History! History of Science! Anything goes!!! Send via jaipreetvirdi@gmail.com, or through the Blog Carnival site. The 28th Edition of The Giant’s Shoulders will be up on Sat. October 16.

  • 18th Century Medical Experts and Medical Expertise

    A brief overview of three fantastic historical papers on eighteenth century expertise and experts: Steven Shapin, “Trusting George Cheyne: Scientific Expertise, Common Sense and Moral Authority in Early Eighteenth-Century Dietetic Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77(2): 263-297. What gives a physician his expertise, and how does one trust that expertise? Shapin addresses this issue,… Continue Reading

  • Monday Series: The Criminalized Body V

    Body-Snatching and the Criminalized Body: A Badge of a Marginalized Condition O Poverty! thou art the unpardonable offence… Thou hast neither rights, charters, immunities nor liberties![1] One of the major public conflicts with dissection stemmed from their fears of body-snatching. The shallow graves of the poor[2] were prime targets for body snatches and the ongoing… Continue Reading

  • Mind & Body: The Philosopher’s Body as a Subject

    I’ve been doing a lot of (re-)reading lately on ideas of the body and the embodiment of  knowledge on the body–mainly because I was aiming for some background reading as I prepared the CFP for the 2011  HAPSAT Conference. Some of these were based on reading summaries I prepared for Prof. Lucia Dacome’s “Body and… Continue Reading

  • Conversing in a Cyberspace Community: The Growth of HPS Blogging

    Originally posted in the October 2010 Newsletter of the History of Science Society In the October 2008 issue of the HSS Newsletter, Ben Cohen, lecturer at University of Virginia and blogger laureate at The World’s Fair, remarked that historians who blog invariably find themselves somewhere along the Ayers-Onuf spectrum: they become either idealists contributing to and influencing public conversation… Continue Reading

  • Article Summary: Harold Cook, “Time’s Bodies: Crafting the Preparation and Preservation of Naturalia.”

    Harold Cook, “Time’s Bodies: Crafting the Preparation and Preservation of Naturalia,” in Merchants and  Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge 2002). Harold Cook’s (Brown University) article takes place in sixteenth and seventeenth Netherlands, and ties together the market economy and its capital investments,… Continue Reading

  • Monday Series: The Criminalized Body IV

    The triumph of justice was a common theme in both the gallows and the anatomy theatre. Crowds were often drawn by the ghoulish atmosphere surrounding the high visibility punishment of the criminal at the gallows, viewing the carnivalisque mood as a restoration for moral justice. Exhibitions of public dissection reflected the “ritualization of the upside-down… Continue Reading

  • Monday Series: The Criminalized Body III

    Punishing the Soul: The Ignoble Body and its Status of Honour The strong cultural connotation between the body and the soul raised conflicting accounts of death, the afterlife, and eschatological implications associated with the cutting of the body. While the dominant religious perspective of Medieval England centered on the doctrine of resurrected Christ, Restoration England… Continue Reading