New Books in the History of Science

Today I sit down for an in-depth conversation with my good friend, Michael Stanley-Baker, a scholar of Chinese religion and medicine. We talk about Mike’s international childhood and how his family history influenced his intellectual life, his training as a Chinese medical practitioner, and his book co-edited with Vivienne Lo, the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2022), which is groundbreaking... and open access! We also talk about Mike’s new book with Manchester University Press, Situating Religion and Medicine in Asia, which opens up a critical conversation about how we understand Asian medicine. Then, we look ahead to Mike’s digital humanities project, called Polyglot Asian Medicines. Along the way we talk rabbit-ducks and how fish know that they're underwater.I hope that you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. And if you want to hear from more experts on Buddhist medicine and related topics, subscribe to Blue Beryl for monthly episodes.Resources mentioned in the episode: Michael Stanley-Baker and Vivienne Lo (eds), Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (2022). Available open access here.  Michael Stanley-Baker, Situating Religion and Medicine in Asia: Methodological Insights and Innovations (2023). The Rabbit-Duck (image) Polyglot Asian Medicines project website Polyglot Asian Medicines intro video Mike's publications Dr. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia.Subscribe to Blue Beryl here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An intimate collection of portraits of internationally renowned scientists and Nobel Prize winners, paired with interviews and personal stories. What makes a brilliant scientist? Who are the people behind the greatest discoveries of our time? Connecting art and science, photographer Herlinde Koelbl seeks the answers in this English translation of the German book Fascination of Science: 60 Encounters with Pioneering Researchers of Our Time (MIT Press, 2023), an indelible collection of portraits of and interviews with sixty pioneering scientists of the twenty-first century. Koelbl’s approach is intimate and accessible, and her highly personal interviews with her subjects reveal the forces (as well as the personal quirks) that motivate the scientists’ work; for example, one wakes up at 3 am because her mind is calm then, another says his best ideas come to him in the shower. These glimpses into the scientists’ lives and thinking add untold texture in this up-to-the-minute survey of the activities and progress that are currently taking place in the broad field of the natural sciences. Koelbl’s interview subjects include Nobel Prize winners Dan Shechtman, Frances Arnold, Carolyn Bertozzi, and cover scientific fields from astronomy, biochemistry, and quantum physics to stem-cell research and AI. Beautifully bringing together art, science, and the written word, Fascination of Science is an inspiring read that shows how creativity, obsession, persistence, and passion drive the pioneering researchers of our time.Herlinde Koelbl is a German photographic artist, author, and documentary filmmaker.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Twin Children of the Holocaust: Stolen Childhood and the Will to Survive (Academic Studies Press, 2023) is an annotated collection of original, informative, and moving photographs of the twins who survived the brutal medical experiments conducted at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp (1943-1945). The experiments were conducted by the infamous physician, Josef Mengele. These never-before-seen photographs were taken by the author (Segal) at the 40th anniversary of the camp’s liberation (January 27, 1985) and the public hearing on Mengele’s crimes at Yad Vashem (A Memorial and a Name) in Jerusalem that followed. Other memorable moments, captured in photographs, include traveling to Krakow, visiting Warsaw and hearing survivors’ testimonies. The photographs are organized into ten sections that unfold chronologically—each section is accompanied by a brief essay to provide compelling context and each photograph has an informative caption.Dr. Nancy L. Segal is Psychology Professor and Director, Twin Studies Center, at California State University, Fullerton. Her book, Born Together-Reared Apart, won the American Psychological Association’s William James Book Award. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and Atlantic Monthly. She has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, and the BBC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gerald O'Brien's book Eugenics, Genetics, and Disability in Historical and Contemporary Perspective: Implications for the Social Work Profession (Oxford UP, 2023) focuses on the conceptual relationship between the American eugenic movement of the early 1900s and contemporary genetic research, policy and practices, and their relevance for social work and related professions. While the expansion of pre-natal testing and other genetic innovations are often couched as a form of "new eugenics," this description is only partially correct. This book provides the first in-depth exploration of the relationship between the emerging social work profession and the eugenic movement during the first quarter of the twentieth century and considers the historical importance of this for the profession today.Social workers played a particularly important role in the movement of eugenic policies from targeting persons with disabilities to limiting procreation among "welfare" recipients, especially minority women. As the profession attempts to come to terms with this problematic history, it also needs to understand the dual "faces" it displays to persons with disabilities. Often purported as supporters of such persons, social workers' continued embracement of the medical model of disabilities keeps them from being accepted by many as true allies in the fight for social justice related to disability inclusion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The contentious science of phrenology once promised insight into character and intellect through external ‘reading’ of the head. In the transforming settler-colonial landscapes of nineteenth-century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, popular phrenologists — figures who often hailed from the margins — performed their science of touch and cranial jargon everywhere from mechanics’ institutions to public houses. In Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Cambridge UP, 2023), Alexandra Roginski recounts a history of this everyday practice, exploring how it featured in the fates of people living in, and moving through, the Tasman World. Innovatively drawing on historical newspapers and a network of archives, she traces the careers of a diverse range of popular phrenologists and those they encountered. By analysing the actions at play in scientific episodes through ethnographic, social and cultural history, Roginski considers how this now-discredited science could, in its own day, yield fleeting power and advantage, even against a backdrop of large-scale dispossession and social brittleness.Piers Kelly is a linguistic anthropologist at the University of New England, Australia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Madness in Buenos Aires: Patients, Psychiatrists, and the Argentine State, 1880-1983 (Ohio UP, 2008) examines the interactions between psychiatrists, patients and their families, and the national state in modern Argentina. This book offers a fresh interpretation of the Argentine state's relationship to modernity and social change during the twentieth century, while also examining the often contentious place of psychiatry in modern Argentina.Drawing on a number of previously untapped archival sources, author Jonathan Ablard uses the experience of psychiatric patients as a case study of how the Argentine state developed and functioned over the last century and of how Argentines interacted with it. Ablard argues that the capacity of the state to provide social services and professional opportunities and to control the populace was often constrained to an extent not previously recognized in scholarly literature. These limitations, including a shortage of hospitals, insufficient budgets, and political and economic instability, shaped the experiences of patients, their families, and doctors and also influenced medical and lay ideas about the nature and significance of mental illness. Furthermore, these experiences, and the institutional framework in which they were imbedded, had a profound impact on how Argentine psychiatrists discussed not only mental illness but also a host of related themes including immigration, poverty, and the role of the state in mitigating social problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A concise overview of fertility technology—its history, practical applications, and ethical and social implications around the world. In the late 1850s, a physician in New York City used a syringe and glass tube to inject half a drop of sperm into a woman’s uterus, marking the first recorded instance of artificial insemination. From that day forward, doctors and scientists have turned to technology in ever more innovative ways to facilitate conception. Fertility Technology (MIT Press, 2023) surveys this history in all its medical, practical, and ethical complexity, and offers a look at state-of-the-art fertility technology in various social and political contexts around the world. Donna J. Drucker’s concise and eminently readable account introduces the five principal types of fertility technologies used in human reproduction—artificial insemination; ovulation timing; sperm, egg, and embryo freezing; in vitro fertilization; and IVF in uterine transplants—discussing the development, manufacture, dispersion, and use of each. Geographically, it focuses on countries where innovations have emerged and countries where these technologies most profoundly affect individuals and population policies. Drucker’s wide-ranging perspective reveals how these technologies, used for birth control as well as conception in many cases, have been critical in shaping the moral, practical, and political meaning of human life, kinship, and family in different nations and cultures since the mid-nineteenth century.Donna J. Drucker is Assistant Director of Scholarship and Research Development at the Columbia University School of Nursing.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Barbara M. Sattler's book The Concept of Motion in Ancient Greek Thought: Foundations in Logic, Method, and Mathematics (Cambridge UP, 2020) examines the birth of the scientific understanding of motion. It investigates which logical tools and methodological principles had to be in place to give a consistent account of motion, and which mathematical notions were introduced to gain control over conceptual problems of motion. It shows how the idea of motion raised two fundamental problems in the 5th and 4th century BCE: bringing together being and non-being, and bringing together time and space. The first problem leads to the exclusion of motion from the realm of rational investigation in Parmenides, the second to Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Methodological and logical developments reacting to these puzzles are shown to be present implicitly in the atomists, and explicitly in Plato who also employs mathematical structures to make motion intelligible. With Aristotle we finally see the first outline of the fundamental framework with which we conceptualise motion today.Professor Barbara Sattler is Chair in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at the Ruhr University Bochum. The main area of her research is metaphysics and natural philosophy in the ancient Greek world.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with statistics. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population, the development of industry and commerce, and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data. Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2022) is a study of how such data influenced every aspect of Victorian culture and thought, from the methods of natural science and the struggle against disease, to the development of social administration and the arguments and conflicts between social classes. Numbers were collected in the 1830s by newly-created statistical societies in response to this 'data revolution'. They became a regular aspect of governmental procedure thereafter, and inspired new ways of interrogating both the natural and social worlds. William Farr used them to study cholera; Florence Nightingale deployed them in campaigns for sanitary improvement; Charles Babbage was inspired to design and build his famous calculating engines to process them. The mid-Victorians employed statistics consistently to make the case for liberal reform. In later decades, however, the emergence of the academic discipline of mathematical statistics - statistics as we use them today - became associated with eugenics and a contrary social philosophy. Where earlier statisticians emphasised the unity of mankind, some later practitioners, following Francis Galton, studied variation and difference within and between groups. In chapters on learned societies, government departments, international statistical collaborations, and different Victorian statisticians, Victorians and Numbers traces the impact of numbers on the era and the intriguing relationship of Victorian statistics with 'Big Data' in our own age.Lawrence Goldman was born in London and educated at Cambridge and Yale. Following a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, he taught British and American History for three decades in Oxford, where he was a fellow of St. Peter's College, and Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004-2014. Latterly he was Director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. His publications include books on Victorian social science and the history of workers' education, and a biography of the historian and political thinker R. H. Tawney. He is now Emeritus Fellow of St. Peter's College, Oxford.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

the near universal disappearance of shared social enterprise: the ruling class builds walls and lunar shuttles, while the rest of us contend with the atrophy of institutional integrity and the utter abdication of providing even minimal shelter from looming disaster.The irony of the Anthropocene era is that, in a neoliberal culture of the self, it is forcing us to consider ourselves as a collective again. For those of us who are not wealthy enough to start a colony on Mars or isolate ourselves from the world, the Anthropocene ends the fantasy of sheer individualism and worldlessness once and for all. It introduces a profound sense of time and events after the so-called "end of history" and an entirely new approach to solidarity.How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford UP, 2022) is a hopeful exploration of how we might inherit the name "Anthropocene," renarrate it, and revise our way of life or thought in view of it. In his book on time, art, and politics in an era of escalating climate change, Holloway takes up difficult, unanswered questions in recent work by Donna Haraway, Kathryn Yusoff, Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Isabelle Stengers, sketching a path toward a radical form of democracy―a zoocracy, or, a rule of all of the living.Travis Holloway is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Farmingdale and a poet and former Goldwater Fellow in Creative Writing at NYU.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices