New Books in the History of Science

Is natural history a genre of political thought? What do we miss about the substance of political ideas when we ignore the study of nature?Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire (University of Florida Press, 2021) demonstrates how the natural historical writings of chroniclers, explorers, and missionaries “helped to lay out a distinct set of empirical foundations for modern political thought.” Dr. Mauro José Caraccioli connects scientific, historical, religious, and political ideals to show how Spanish natural history of the so-called “New World” was deeply political.Political theorists focus on empire, racial hierarchy, conquest, and colonization but Caraccioli cautions not to ignore the “interplay between empire, faith, and the experiences of New World environments” that shaped Imperial Spain’s early efforts to shape culture and politics. That natural history context is essential to fully understand the context of early modern political thought. Caraccioli uses natural history texts written by early Spanish missionaries to create the “first work of political theory that accounts for New World exploration and evangelization as a dual science of domination.” The intersecting analysis of the ecological, political, religious, and historical makes this book an important one for the 21st century.Dr. Mauro José Caraccioli is an assistant professor of political science and core faculty in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) at Virginia Tech.Amber Gonzalez assisted with this podcast.Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thousands of stories are given voice by Marissa Mika in Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda (Ohio UP, 2021), a fearless, warm, and humane history of the Uganda Cancer Institute’s first half century. Mika treads carefully but surely through the fields of colonial and post-colonial medical research and politics while never losing sight of the individuals who worked, planned, improvised, suffered, survived and died at the UCI. The book is a fascinating contrast to the global north history of pediatric oncology as told, for example, by former National Cancer Institute director Vincent DeVita Jr. in The Death of Cancer. As Mika makes abundantly clear, there is no such wild optimism surrounding cancer in Uganda. There is, though, resourcefulness, commitment, and an ability to adapt to extraordinary circumstances on a daily basis. This richly researched book undoubtedly has significant academic merit in fields including, but not limited to, the history of medicine. It should appeal equally to global health activists who want to understand better the challenges and incremental accomplishments of work on the ground.Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Double Exposure: How Social Psychology Fell in Love with the Movies (Rutgers University Press, 2022) examines the role of film in shaping social psychology’s landmark postwar experiments. Dr. Kathryn Millard shares that we are told that most of us will inflict electric shocks on a fellow citizen when ordered to do so. Act as a brutal prison guard when we put on a uniform. Walk on by when we see a stranger in need. But there is more to the story. Documentaries that investigators claimed as evidence were central to capturing the public imagination.Did they provide an alibi for twentieth century humanity? Millard examines dramaturgy, staging and filming of these experiments, including Milgram's Obedience Experiments, the Stanford Prison Experiment and many more to recover a new set of narratives.Kathryn Millard is a writer, independent filmmaker and an honorary professor of screen and creative arts at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Screenwriting in a Digital Era.Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Tug Villages: Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at a Tug of War Festival. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

According to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, since 2000, the United States has experienced over 700,000 deaths due to drug overdose. Addiction and substance use disorders are at the root of this enormous loss, and about half of people who struggle with substance use disorder will experience some mental health disorder during their life. And vice versa—many individuals struggling with mental health disorders also struggle with various forms of addiction.Carl Erik Fisher, author of The Urge: Our History of Addiction (Penguin Press, 2022), has expertise in law, ethics, and policy related to psychiatry and neuroscience. His personal struggle with addiction in combination with his professional expertise converges to help us understand the forces that have shaped addiction throughout our history. On this episode of POTC, Carl and Yael discuss the social contingencies and historical contexts that lead to addiction, substance use disorder, and co-morbid mental health issues. Join us in this episode to learn more about commonly held beliefs about addiction, prescribers’ blind spots to certain medications, and much much more! Yael Schonbrun is a licensed clinical psychologist who wears a number of professional hats: she a small private practice specializing in evidence-based relationship therapy, she’s an assistant professor at Brown University, and she writes for nonacademic audiences about working parenthood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, cofounders of Retraction Watch. We talk about lots of things, retracting very few.Ivan Oransky : "Accountability in science certainly does not come down to only retracting papers, because there are just lots of issues. And by the way, just to remind everyone, science is very much a human endeavor. It doesn't exist outside of humans doing the science. I mean, facts exist, and there is truth out there, and we'd very much appear to be getting close and closer to it — that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the actual process, like, how do we learn these things. How — as this podcast more generally looks at — how does knowledge get known. Basically, epistemology. But that requires human beings. It requires human beings interpreting, talking and listening, collaborating, and so that's one part of science that is really critical. Therefore, of course, the issue of accountability is multifactorial."The Retraction Watch database is here. You might also be interested in this article: "Repeat Offenders: When Scientific Fraudsters Slip Through the Cracks." You can learn more about retraction here. Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the context of slavery, science is usually associated with slaveholders' scientific justifications of racism. But abolitionists were equally adept at using scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders.Looking beyond the science of race, The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (Yale UP, 2021) shows how Black and white scientists and abolitionists drew upon a host of scientific disciplines--from chemistry, botany, and geology, to medicine and technology--to portray slaveholders as the enemies of progress. From the 1770s through the 1860s, scientists and abolitionists in Britain and the United States argued that slavery stood in the way of scientific progress, blinded slaveholders to scientific evidence, and prevented enslavers from adopting labor-saving technologies that might eradicate enslaved labor.While historians increasingly highlight slavery's centrality to the modern world, fueling the rise of capitalism, science, and technology, few have asked where the myth of slavery's backwardness comes from in the first place. This book contends that by routinely portraying slaveholders as the enemies of science, abolitionists and scientists helped generate that myth.Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is a logical flaw in the statistical methods used across experimental science. This fault is not a minor academic quibble: it underlies a reproducibility crisis now threatening entire disciplines. In an increasingly statistics-reliant society, this same deeply rooted error shapes decisions in medicine, law, and public policy with profound consequences. The foundation of the problem is a misunderstanding of probability and its role in making inferences from observations.Aubrey Clayton traces the history of how statistics went astray, beginning with the groundbreaking work of the seventeenth-century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli and winding through gambling, astronomy, and genetics. Clayton recounts the feuds among rival schools of statistics, exploring the surprisingly human problems that gave rise to the discipline and the all-too-human shortcomings that derailed it. He highlights how influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures developed a statistical methodology they claimed was purely objective in order to silence critics of their political agendas, including eugenics.Clayton provides a clear account of the mathematics and logic of probability, conveying complex concepts accessibly for readers interested in the statistical methods that frame our understanding of the world. He contends that we need to take a Bayesian approach--that is, to incorporate prior knowledge when reasoning with incomplete information--in order to resolve the crisis. Ranging across math, philosophy, and culture, Bernoulli's Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science (Columbia UP, 2021) explains why something has gone wrong with how we use data--and how to fix it.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1847, Herman Helmholtz, arguably the most important German physicist of the nineteenth century, published his formulation of what became known as the conservation of energy--unarguably the most important single development in physics of that century, transforming what had been a conglomeration of separate topics into a coherent field unified by the concept of energy. In Helmholtz and the Conservation of Energy: Contexts of Creation and Reception (MIT Press, 2021), Kenneth Caneva offers a detailed account of Helmholtz's work on the subject, the sources that he drew upon, the varying responses to his work from scientists of the era, and the impact on physics as a discipline.Caneva describes the set of abiding concerns that prompted Helmholtz's work, including his rejection of the idea of a work-performing vital force, and investigates Helmholtz's relationship to both an older generation of physicists and an emerging community of reformist physiologists. He analyzes Helmholtz's indebtedness to Johannes Müller and Justus Liebig and discusses Helmholtz's tense and ambivalent relationship to the work of Robert Mayer, who had earlier proposed the uncreatability, indestructibility, and transformability of force. Caneva examines Helmholtz's continued engagement with the subject, his role in the acceptance of the conservation of energy as the central principle of physics, and the eventual incorporation of the principle in textbooks as established science.Corinne Doria is a historian specializing in the social history of medicine. She is a lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen and teaches Disability Studies at Sciences-Po (Paris). Her work focuses on the history of ophthalmology and visual impairment in the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite the virtually unanimous agreement about his importance, describing Hirschman’s legacy and influence on others is not an easy task— arguably because he was indeed in a league of his own. His search for fresh perspectives was so eclectic that, as many have noted, no recognizable school has ever developed in his footsteps …– Michele Alacevich, Albert O. Hirschman – An Intellectual Biography (2021)These thoughts from the concluding chapter of Michele Alacevich’s latest book Albert O. Hirschman: An Intellectual Biography (Columbia University Press, 2021), speaks to the remarkable life and scholarship as analyzed and described in the professor’s concise and stimulating book of 330 pages including notes and index. In this episode Professor Alacevich explains the significance and ongoing relevance of the interesting work of the political economist and social scientist Hirschman who was a product of the Weimar Republic, and who later became a founding member of The Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. As many listeners know, Hirschman authored books such as Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, The Passions and The Interests, and The Rhetoric of Reaction – just a few of his more recognizable titles as Michele discusses many others in this interview.For instance, Professor Alacevich describes the 1977, The Passions and The Interests, as a history of ideas wherein Hirschman tried to make sense of political developments of the time in Latin America by examining the link between economic growth and dictatorship. He also talks about the 1967, Development Projects Observed, as insightful analysis that the original publisher reissued in 2015 with a Foreword by Cass Sunstein and an Afterword written by Michele even though he modestly does not mention his own contribution in this conversation.This new book examines the ideas and scholarly debate surrounding Hirschman’s scholarly work and is a nice complement to the 2013, The Worldly Philosopher, a Hirschman biography by Jeremy Adelman. Professor Alacevich shares many interesting insights about the relevance of Hirschman’s approach today – from how the problem of democracy was a unifying theme in his scholarship including the more formal economic analysis, as well as his emphasis on how ‘doubt’ must be at the heart of a working democracy. Michele’s thoughtful analysis of Hirschman’s important ideas and works is well-worth a listen as is a reading of his engaging intellectual biography.Michele Alacevich is a professor of Economic History and Thought at the University of Bologna, and is currently working on a history of development economics in relation to the three questions of economic growth, democracy, and environmental sustainability.Keith Krueger lectures at the SILC Business School in Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From 1942 through 1972, American biomedical researchers deliberately infected people with hepatitis. Government-sponsored researchers were attempting to discover the basic features of the disease and the viruses causing it, and develop interventions that would quell recurring outbreaks. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-person interviews, Sydney Halpern traces the hepatitis program from its origins in World War II through its expansion during the initial Cold War years, to its demise in the early 1970s amid outcry over research abuse. The subjects in hepatitis studies were members of stigmatized groups--conscientious objectors, prison inmates, and developmentally disabled adults and children. Dangerous Medicine: The Story Behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis (Yale UP, 2021) reveals how researchers invoked military and scientific imperatives and the rhetoric of common good to win support for the experiments and access to potential recruits. Halpern examines consequences of participation for subjects' long-term health, and raises troubling questions about hazardous human experiments aimed at controlling today's epidemic diseases.Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices