New Books in the History of Science

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Sharon Strocchia, Professor of History at Emory University. She is the author of Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and the book we are here to talk about today, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, a 2019 Harvard University Press release. In this book, Professor Strocchia continues the work of her career: recentering the discourse to include the formative contributions of women in the Italian Renaissance. Through a discussion of Medici women, convent pharmacists, and hospital nurses, Strocchia adeptly argues that women played a leading role in the development of Renaissance medicine.Jana Byars is the academic director of SIT Amsterdam’s study abroad program, Gender and Sexuality in an International Perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a new kind of demon mischievously materialized in the scientific imagination itself. Scientists began to employ hypothetical beings to perform certain roles in thought experiments—experiments that can only be done in the imagination—and these impish assistants helped scientists achieve major breakthroughs that pushed forward the frontiers of science and technology.Spanning four centuries of discovery—from René Descartes, whose demon could hijack sensorial reality, to James Clerk Maxwell, whose molecular-sized demon deftly broke the second law of thermodynamics, to Darwin, Einstein, Feynman, and beyond—Jimena Canales tells a shadow history of science and the demons that bedevil it. In Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science (Princeton UP, 2020), she reveals how the greatest scientific thinkers used demons to explore problems, test the limits of what is possible, and better understand nature. Their imaginary familiars helped unlock the secrets of entropy, heredity, relativity, quantum mechanics, and other scientific wonders—and continue to inspire breakthroughs in the realms of computer science, artificial intelligence, and economics today.The world may no longer be haunted as it once was, but the demons of the scientific imagination are alive and well, continuing to play a vital role in scientists’ efforts to explore the unknown and make the impossible real. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1618, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, the German alchemist and physician Michael Maier published Atalanta fugiens, an intriguing and complex musical alchemical emblem book designed to engage the ear, eye, and intellect. The book unfolds as a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains an accompanying "fugue" music scored for three voices. Historians of alchemy have long understood this virtuoso work as an ambitious demonstration of the art’s literary potential and of the possibilities of the early modern printed book.Atalanta fugiens lends itself unusually well to today’s digital tools. Re-rendering Maier’s multimedia alchemical project as an enhanced online publication, Furnace and Fugue allows contemporary readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate Atalanta fugiens in ways that Maier perhaps imagined but that were impossible to fully realize before now. An interactive, layered digital edition provides accessibility and flexibility, presenting all the elements of the original book along with significant enhancements that allow for deep engagement by specialists and nonspecialists alike.Three short introductory essays invite readers to get acquainted with early modern alchemy, and Michael Maier. Eight extended interpretive essays explore Atalanta fugiens and its place in the history of music, science, print, and visual culture in early modern Europe. These interdisciplinary essays also include interactive features that clarify and/or advance the authors’ arguments while positioning Furnace and Fugue as an original, uniquely engaging contribution to our understanding of early modern culture.Drs. Bilak and Nummedal are the editors of this innovative digital edition of a seventeenth-century alchemical text that combines text, image, and music. Furnace & Fugue was developed by Brown University’s Mellon-supported Digital Publications Initiative, and published by the University of Virginia Press (2020) as an open-access edition.Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Social Science Research Institute at Brown University.Dr. Bilak is an academic and a goldsmith. She is the Creative Director of 12 Keys Consultancy & Design, LLC, and an Independent Scholar. She is an historian of early modern science Donna's research extends to the cross-cultural examination of jewellery, artisanal technologies, and meaning-making with materials. Dr. Nummedal is Professor of History and of Italian Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). With Janice Neri and John V. Calhoun, she published John Abbot and William Swainson: Art, Science, and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century Natural History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried it as a cure for tuberculosis, pellagra and anemia; proposed it as a means to reanimate seemingly dead soldiers on the battlefield. It was a contested therapy because it meant crossing boundaries and challenging taboos. Was the transfusion of lamb blood into desperately sick humans really defensible?Boel Berner, Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall of Lamb Blood Transfusion in 19th Century Medicine and Beyond (Transcript Verlag, 2020) takes the reader on a journey into hospital wards and lunatic asylums, physiological laboratories and 19th century wars. It presents a fascinating story of medical knowledge, ambitions and concerns – a story that provides lessons for current debates on the morality of medical experimentation and care.Boel Berner is a sociologist, historian, and professor emerita at Linköping University in Sweden. In her research she investigates the character and power of expertise, historically and today. She has studied education and work, the gendered nature of technical knowledge, household modernization, and issues of risk. Her current work is oriented towards the history of medicine. It focuses, besides questions of blood donation and transfusion, on the politics of blood group analysis in the interwar years.Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cancer exists in nearly every animal and has afflicted humans as long as our species has walked the earth. In Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal (Benbella Books, 2020), Kat Arney reveals the secrets of our most formidable medical enemy, most notably the fact that it isn't so much a foreign invader as a double agent: cancer is hardwired into the fundamental processes of life. New evidence shows that this disease is the result of the same evolutionary changes that allowed us to thrive. Evolution helped us outsmart our environment, and it helps cancer outsmart its environment as well—alas, that environment is us.Rebel Cell is a story about life and death, hope and hubris, nature and nurture. It's about a new way of thinking about what this disease really is and the role it plays in human life. Above all, it's a story about where cancer came from, where it's going, and how we can stop it.Matthew Jordan is a professor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (University of Florida Press 2020), a collection edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Joanna Page is a wonderful and imaginative contribution to the fields of history of science, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. This volume assembles a broad and varied collection of chapters that span from the colonial period to the twenty first century, and explore diverse themes in varied Latin American regions: utopianism; science and the modern nation; Latin America as a site of knowledge production; the convergence between science and arts; critiques to modernity; among others. In this exciting conversation Blanco and Page tell us about the collaborative process that led to this book, the many topics and time periods they covered, and the specific contributions of their own chapters. Listeners will find in this book an exciting new addition to the literature, one that is particularly important today because, as the authors remind us, political actors use ‘science’ as a concept in varied and contradictory ways. This makes evident one of the most important claims of this book: the scientific and the political are always entangled. As the collection demonstrates, Latin America has been a site where this relationship has been explored, exposed and analyzed many times over.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

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2018), his bold, vibrant exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, now updated with a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship.Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump (with Simon Schaffer), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, and The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation.Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas (Princeton UP, 2019) takes readers on a remarkable journey through hundreds of years to tell the story of how calculus evolved into the subject we know today. David Bressoud explains why calculus is credited to seventeenth-century figures Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, and how its current structure is based on developments that arose in the nineteenth century. Bressoud argues that a pedagogy informed by the historical development of calculus represents a sounder way for students to learn this fascinating area of mathematics.Delving into calculus’s birth in the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean—particularly in Syracuse, Sicily and Alexandria, Egypt—as well as India and the Islamic Middle East, Bressoud considers how calculus developed in response to essential questions emerging from engineering and astronomy. He looks at how Newton and Leibniz built their work on a flurry of activity that occurred throughout Europe, and how Italian philosophers such as Galileo Galilei played a particularly important role. In describing calculus’s evolution, Bressoud reveals problems with the standard ordering of its curriculum: limits, differentiation, integration, and series. He contends that the historical order—integration as accumulation, then differentiation as ratios of change, series as sequences of partial sums, and finally limits as they arise from the algebra of inequalities—makes more sense in the classroom environment.Exploring the motivations behind calculus’s discovery, Calculus Reordered highlights how this essential tool of mathematics came to be.David M. Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics at Macalester College and Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. His many books include Second Year Calculus and A Radical Approach to Lebesgue’s Theory of Integration. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (University Of Chicago Press) aims to remake this staid vision.Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world.Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from environmental history, U.S. history, and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future uncovers the rich loam hiding beneath ostensibly infertile scholarly terrain, revealing a surprising area of agricultural experimentation that transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation.New Books Network listeners can purchase The Nature of the Future for 25% off using the coupon code PAWLEY here.Emily Pawley is Associate Professor of History at Dickinson College. Twitter.Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), historian of science Joshua Nall shows us that a blurry boundary between science and journalism was a key feature—not a bug—of the emergence of modern astronomy.Focusing on objects and media, such as newspapers, encyclopedias, cigarette cards, and globes, Nall offers a history of how astronomers’ cultivation of a mass public shaped their discipline as it managed controversies over the possibility of canals on Mars, and even interplanetary communication. This book is strongly recommended for historians of science and communication, as well as those with an eye for material culture.Joshua Nall is curator of modern sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used statistics to make claims of discrimination in 1970s America, and how the relationship between rights and num- bers became a flashpoint in political struggles over bureaucracy, race, and law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices