• REVIEW: Medical Monopoly

    BOOK REVIEW Joseph M. Gabriel, Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014). In the 1980s, historians began to refer to the “medical marketplace” as a model for analyzing the experiences of health and illness. Adopting a normative understanding of the… Continue Reading

  • REVIEW: Sounds of Modern History

    Book Review: Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th and 20th Century Europe Edited by Daniel Morat (Berghahn Books, 2014) As a historian who studies the history of deafness, I am fascinated with the experiences and histories of sound and auditory perception. Sounds have become so ubiquitous to daily living that it seems only… Continue Reading

  • Historiography of the Market for Health

    Parallel to my research on socio-educational institutions for the deaf, I’m hoping to tie together themes of technological progress, entrepreneurialism and consumerism with the broad and diverse medical community and marketplace—what we can aptly call medical pluralism. There’s been a lot of historical scholarship on the complex dynamics that wove together a diverse group of… Continue Reading

  • Histories of Deaf Histories

    One of the agendas of my dissertation is to build a steady bridge between scholarship from the history of medicine and scholarship from Deaf and Disability Studies. Granted, as part of my education at IHPST, my research has been lopsided, for I’ve concentrated more on the history of medicine and technologies (especially relating to medical… Continue Reading

  • Atomic Age Artifacts

    A group of history students at the University of Ottawa prepared a Prezi based on their research in the collections at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, under the supervision of David Pantalony. This is an excellent way to integrate artifacts into the study of history, encouraging group work and fun at the same time!… Continue Reading

  • UTSIC Website Active!

    I’m pleased to announce that the University of Toronto Scientific Instruments Collection Website is now active! The first post is an essay, “A Short History of the University of Toronto Scientific Instruments Collection, written by Erich Weidenhammer (IHPST, University of Toronto) & Michael Da Silva (University of Toronto Faculty of Law). The post is a reprint of… Continue Reading

  • For the Maker of the Stars: The Cultural Reception of Print

    Accept then, most clement Prince, this gentle glory reserved by the stars for you. May you long enjoy those blessing which are sent to you not so much from the stars as from God, their Maker and their Governor. Your Highness’s most devoted servant, Galileo Galilei. Padua, Mach 12, 1610 -Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Venice, 1610); Dedication letter to Cosimo II… 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

  • Navigating the History of Science Blogosphere

    I’m writing a piece for the History of Science Society fall newsletter about history of science/medicine blogs and blogging on the blogosphere. It seems lately this has been a hot topic for discussion on the ‘net, especially after the New York Times Article which outlines possible web-alternatives to peer-review. Last year, our favourite history of… Continue Reading

  • UTSIC

    In this blog post, I want to share one of the projects I’ve been involved with: The University of Toronto Scientific Instruments Collection (UTSIC), a volunteer project at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, to catalogue, collect, and maintain all of the university’s scientific instruments collection. Several graduate students who… Continue Reading

  • Reading Artifacts: Summer Institute in Material Culture Research

    For one week last August, I had the pleasure at participating the inaugural launch of “Reading Artifacts: Summer Institute in Material Culture Research,” hosted by and located at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa, Ontario. Bringing together scholars and experts from all over the world, the Summer Institute aimed to break new ground on approaching… Continue Reading