New Books in the History of Science

There's been a lot of resurgent interest in the Silk Routes lately, particularly looking at the cultural, political, and economic connections between "East" and "West" that challenge long held narratives of a world that only became interconnected in the last half millennium. Even so, it's been rarely appreciated how much of the history of Eurasian medicine in the premodern period hinges on cross-cultural interactions and knowledge transmissions along these same lines of contact. Using manuscripts found in key Eurasian nodes of the medieval world - Dunhuang, Kucha, the Cairo Geniza, and Tabriz - this fascinating and much-needed book analyses a number of case-studies of Eurasian medical encounters, giving a voice to places, languages, people and narratives which were once prominent but have gone silent.ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters Along the Silk Roads (Bloomsbury, 2021) is an important book for those interested in the history of medicine and the transmissions of knowledge that have taken place over the course of global history.Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim is Reader in History at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the co-editor of Rashid al-Din: Agent and Mediator of Cultural Exchanges in Ilkhanid Iran, Islam and Tibet: Interactions along the Musk Routes, and Astro-Medicine: Astrology and Medicine, East and West.Christopher S. Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas and Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tuberculosis: The Singapore Experience, 1867-2018 (Routledge, 2021), co-written by Dr. Loh, a historian and Dr. Hsu Li Yang, a medical doctor offers an inter-disciplinary analysis of the way in the which the disease was managed from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This book charts the relationship between disease, society and the state, outlining the struggles of colonial and post-colonial governments to cope with infectious disease and to establish effective public health programmes and institutions. British colonial administrators initially viewed tuberculosis as a racial problem linked to the poverty, housing and insanitary habits of the Chinese working class. After the Second World War, ambitious medical and urban improvement initiatives were instituted by the returning British colonial government with considerable success. These schemes in the post-colonial period set the tone for continuous biopolitical intervention by the post-colonial Singapore state whose struggle against infectious disease in a densely populated city never really ended. The focus on infections makes this book an apt one to discuss when Singapore – and the world- is still struggling against Covid-19 and its multiple variants.Dr. Loh Kah Seng a historian of Singapore and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He is interested in urban history and social history of cities. He currently runs Chronicles Research and Education, a research consultancy on Singapore heritage.Faizah Zakaria is assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University. You can find her website at www.faizahzak.com and on Twitter @laurelinarien. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1804, King Charles IV of Spain enacted a royal order mandating the postmortem cesarean procedure in all of Spain's dominions. The Audiencia de Guatemala, way back in 1785, had already enacted a law mandating postmortem cesareans for all deceased pregnant women and even those suspected of being pregnant when they had passed away. Audiencias of other viceroyalties also enacted similar laws before 1804. What explains the emergence of the postmortem cesarean operation in colonial Latin America? What was the purpose of this procedure?Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire (Penn State Press, 2020), edited by Drs. Martha Few, Zeb Tortorici, and Adam Warren tell us the story of the postmortem cesarean operation in the Spanish Empire during the eighteenth century, though the book builds a genealogy that situates this procedure in a longer history that begins in the medieval period (and even earlier!) and extends way up the twentieth century. Part of the Latin American Original series (LAO) of the Pennsylvania University Press, this book centers on the translation (made by Nina M. Scott) of a fascinating medicoreligious text: Pedro José de Arrese’s Physical, Canonical, Moral Principles . . . on the Baptism of Miscarried Fetuses and the Cesarean Operation on Women Who Die Pregnant.Additionally, the editors present us with shorter excerpts of a wide range of texts (other medical treatises, scientific and political journals, medical instructions) that also deal with the postmortem cesarean operation in the Spanish American world. Here we talk about transatlantic enlightenment cultures; different conceptions of life and death; the co-existence and co-production of religion and medical procedures; the changes that the cesarean operation went through in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and lastly, as usual, why this history matters to the present. A must for those listeners that want to learn more about the history of the body, medicine, and gender! Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union conducted an ambitious yet clandestine programme to map the world - from big cities like New York and Tokyo, to seemingly-obscure towns like Gainsborough (Lincolnshire) and Pontiac (Missouri). The programme was unlike any other of its time, encompassing a wide variety of topographic maps and city plans in incredible detail. The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is not only a compilation of some 350 extracts of this collection, but also a deep dive into the provenance, nature and applications of these Cold War era Soviet maps. Join us as we talk to co-authors John Davies and Alex Kent about the joys of working with maps, the difficulties they encountered researching the Soviet mapping programme, and their visions for the future. Listeners interested in contributing to John and Alex's research may contact them at author@redatlasbook.com. Prints of Soviet City Plans are also available on their website.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we have John Christopoulos, Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, to talk about his new book, Abortion in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2021)In this authoritative history, John Christopoulos provides a provocative and far-reaching account of abortion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. His poignant portraits of women who terminated or were forced to terminate pregnancies offer a corrective to longstanding views: he finds that Italians maintained a fundamental ambivalence about abortion. Italians from all levels of society sought, had, and participated in abortions. Early modern Italy was not an absolute anti-abortion culture, an exemplary Catholic society centered on the “traditional family.” Rather, Christopoulos shows, Italians held many views on abortion, and their responses to its practice varied.Bringing together medical, religious, and legal perspectives alongside a social and cultural history of sexuality, reproduction, and the family, Christopoulos offers a nuanced and convincing account of the meanings Italians ascribed to abortion and shows how prevailing ideas about the practice were spread, modified, and challenged. Christopoulos begins by introducing readers to prevailing ideas about abortion and women’s bodies, describing the widely available purgative medicines and surgeries that various healers and women themselves employed to terminate pregnancies. He then explores how these ideas and practices ran up against and shaped theology, medicine, and law. Catholic understanding of abortion was changing amid religious, legal, and scientific debates concerning the nature of human life, women’s bodies, and sexual politics. Christopoulos examines how ecclesiastical, secular, and medical authorities sought to regulate abortion, and how tribunals investigated and punished its procurers—or did not, even when they could have. Abortion in Early Modern Italy offers a compelling and sensitive study of abortion in a time of dramatic religious, scientific, and social change. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Alex Csiszar, professor in the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University and author of The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (U Chicago Press, 2018). We talk about the British, the French, and the Germans. No joke.Alex Csiszar : "There's this myth out there about what makes a scientist a scientist. It's that they're highly skeptical of everything. They don't believe a claim until they see it with their own eyes. But anybody who spends any kind of time in the scientific process knows this is ridiculous. Most everything that everybody believes in the sciences is stuff that they've been given to believe through reading papers, through education, through being told by their colleagues, through textbooks–––almost everything anybody in the sciences believes has come to them through trust. And the formats and genres through which a lot of that stuff comes to one's eyes matter a lot for generating that trust. Though, maybe one of the lessons of the book is that the formats and genres might matter a little less than you might at first think because there are other means, perhaps more important means, through which individuals come to trust a particular claim––and personal contacts matter a lot here. But clearly what is being discussed in a lot of the debates that I follow in this book are the means through which such trust can be established, guaranteed."Daniel heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The realities of race that continue to plague the United States have direct ties to the anthropology. Anthropologists often imagine their discipline as inherently anti-racist and historically connected to social justice movements. But just how true is that? In Boasians at War: Anthropology, Race, and World War II (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) Anthony Hazard examines the work of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Ashley Montagu, Margaret Mead, and Melville Herskovits to examine the ways they did -- or didn't -- theorize the emergence of racism as both systemic and interpersonal. Putting their work in the context of the black freedom struggle, Hazard evaluates the ways in which these anthropologists engaged racism both in the discipline of anthropology and in the wider world. In this episode of the podcast, hose Alex Golub sits down with Tony and has a frank talk about the strengths and weaknesses of some of American cultural anthropology's key figures. They also discuss some 'meta' questions, including how we should judge people who lived in a different time and different context from us, and where the line between 'ally' and 'co-conspirator' as anthropologists and other academics take their moral sensibilities outside the academy and into the broader world.Associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Olga Tufnell (1905–85) was a British archaeologist working in Egypt, Cyprus, and Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, a period often described as a golden age of archaeological discovery. Tufnell achieved extraordinary success for an “amateur” archaeologist and as a woman during a time when the field of professional archaeology was heavily dominated by men, typically with university training.Olga Tufnell’s 'Perfect Journey': Letters and Photographs of an Archaeologist in the Levant and Mediterranean (UCL Press, 2021), edited by Jack Green and Ros Henry, presents, for the first time, letters and photographs by Tufnell primarily during her pioneering work in the 1920s and 1930s. From the Palestine Exploration Fund archive, these records not only shed light on the discoveries made by Tufnell and her colleagues, but are also a window into the past, often narrating contemporary events, and revealing a great deal about the way in which Olga Tufnell viewed the rapidly changing, often contentious world around her.With expert commentary and annotation by the editors that situate these records in their historical and archaeological contexts, this book is a crucial addition to the growing bibliography on the history of archaeology around the world, and the Levant specifically. This text can be read well as an archaeological account, a historical primary source reader, or a travelogue from a past age.Samuel Pfister is the collections manager at the Badè Museum in California's East Bay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health (MIT Press, 2020), physician-anthropologist Eugene T. Richardson explores how public health practices—from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment—help perpetuate global inequities.This book questions the Global North's "monopoly on truth" in global public health science, making a provocative claim: that public health science manages and maintains global health inequity. Richardson, a physician and anthropologist, examines the conventional public health approach to epidemiology through the lens of a participant-observer, identifying a dogmatic commitment to the quantitative paradigm. This paradigm, he argues, plays a role in causing and perpetrating public health crises. The mechanisms of public health science--and epidemiology in particular--that set public health agendas and claim a monopoly on truth stem from a colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492.Deploying a range of rhetorical tools, including ironism, “redescriptions” of public health crises, Platonic dialogue, flash fiction, allegory, and koan, Richardson describes how epidemiology uses models of disease causation that serve protected affluence (the possessing classes) by setting epistemic limits to the understanding of why some groups live sicker lives than others—limits that sustain predatory accumulation rather than challenge it. Drawing on his clinical work in a variety of epidemics, including Ebola in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, leishmania in the Sudan, HIV/TB in southern Africa, diphtheria in Bangladesh, and SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, he concludes that the biggest epidemic we currently face is an epidemic of illusions—one that is propagated by the coloniality of knowledge production.Eugene T. Richardson, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Visiting Faculty at the University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, Rwanda, and Chair of the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. Her current work concerns the politics of travel in Cold War US; she has previously published on US intervention in the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Plato’s Heaven: A User’s Guide is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and James Robert Brown, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. This wide-ranging conversation addresses a central theme in current philosophy: Platonism vs. Naturalism and provides accounts of both approaches to mathematics. The Platonist-Naturalist debate over mathematics is explored in a comprehensive fashion and also sheds light on non-mathematical aspects of a dispute that is central to contemporary philosophy. Thought experiments stand as a fascinating challenge to the necessity of data in the empirical sciences. Are these experiments, conducted uniquely in our imagination, simply rhetorical devices or communication tools or are they an essential part of scientific practice? This book also surveys the current state of this debate and explores new avenues of research into the epistemology of thought experiments.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices