Courting Inspiration: How the Health Humanities CanPattern the Imagination of Physicians to Resolve Medicine's Epistemic Crisis.
The dominant genres of the American healthcare system-electronic health records and research reports-are strategies for advancing commercial and empirical goals. These strategies have led us into an epistemic crisis in which clinicians and patients suffer from information overload, politicized health information, and conflicting narratives about medical practices across the lifespan, from vaccines in childhood to care at the end of life, resulting in a loss of trust between clinicians and patients. Two recent books offer insight into how previous epistemic crises were resolved by thepatterning of physicians' imaginations through genres now associated with health humanities. In her history of medicine in the early United States, the literary scholar Sari Altschuler shows how physicians used limericks, maps, and satires to address epistemic crises resulting from pandemics and the development of novel technologies. In her philosophy of art and imagination, the theologian Judith Wolfe shows how perceptual shifts can direct people and communities to new ends. When read in conversation, the works of Altschuler and Wolfe suggest the health humanities can provide novel strategies otherwise unavailable to physicians facing our current epistemic crisis.
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- Jun 12, 2010
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Underestimation of Influenza Viral Infection in Childhood Asthma Exacerbations
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- 10.1177/08969205211069614
- Jan 24, 2022
- Critical Sociology
In this article, we analyze the role of conspiracy theories, especially the spread of QAnon during the COVID-19 pandemics, in the legitimation crisis and epistemic crisis in contemporary democracies. We discuss Habermas’ theory of legitimation crisis and the potential for reactionary movements in times of such crisis, as well as Hofstadter’s description of the paranoid style in political culture. We explain the notion of ‘epistemic crisis’ as theorized by Larry Laudan and discussed recently in relation to social media. We discuss anti-intellectualism in Hofstadter’s terms, and explain its connection with populism. Finally, we explain how all of this comes to bear on the contemporary proliferation of conspiracy theory, using QAnon and the COVID crisis as our point of reference, and examples from the United States and Brazil to illustrate our points. QAnon fueled COVID-19 conspiracy theories, and COVID-19 conspiracy theories rocketed QAnon to a place of major influence.
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- 10.1086/663619
- Dec 1, 2011
- Isis
Notes on Contributors
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- 10.1086/676579
- Jun 1, 2014
- Isis
Notes on Contributors
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- 10.1086/666369
- Jun 1, 2012
- Isis
Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBrooke Abounader is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. She studies the role of representational inaccuracy in scientific modeling.Anna Akasoy, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oriental Institute at Oxford, specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of the medieval Muslim West, contacts between the Islamic world and other cultures, and the role of Islamic history and culture in modern political debates in Western Europe.Garland E. Allen is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. He has a special interest in the history of genetics (and eugenics), evolution, and embryology and their interactions in the first half of the twentieth century.Casper Andersen is an assistant professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His main area of research is history of science, technology, and empires. His publications include the monograph British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914 (2011), and he is coediting the forthcoming five-volume collection British Governance and Administration in Africa, 1880–1940 (2013).Warwick Anderson is Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Department of History and the Centre for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Johns Hopkins, 2008) and coeditor of Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Postcolonial Sovereignties (Duke, 2011). His current research explores the global history of scientific investigations of race mixing in the twentieth century.Peder Anker is an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and in the Environmental Studies Program at New York University. His works include Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001), and From Bauhaus to Eco-House: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press, 2010). See www.pederanker.com.Ross Bassett is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. He is working on a history of Indians who studied at MIT.Jakob Bek-Thomsen has a postdoctoral position at the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. He has recently finished his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Nicolaus Steno and the Making of an Early Modern Career: Nature, Knowledge, and Networks at the Court of the Medici, 1657–1672.” He is currently working on the emergence of finance and its connections with natural philosophy and religion in the early modern period.Jim Bennett is Director of the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. His research interests lie in the history of instruments, of practical mathematics, and of astronomy.Marvin Bolt, Director of the Webster Institute at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, is authoring the Adler's Optical Instruments catalogue. He served on the editorial team of the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, studies the Herschel family, and researches the history of the telescope, early seventeenth-century examples in particular.Christian Bonah is Professor for the History of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of Strasbourg and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has worked on comparative history of medical education, the history of medicaments, and the history of human experimentation. Recent work includes research on risk perception and management in drug scandals as well as studies on medical films.Sonja Brentjes is currently a researcher in a “project of excellence” sponsored by the Junta of Andalusia at the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and History of Science of the University of Seville. She publishes on three major topics: Arabic and Persian versions of Euclid's Elements, the mathematical sciences at madrasas in Islamic societies before 1700, and cross-cultural exchange of knowledge in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.Thomas Broman is Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests include eighteenth-century science and medicine, and he is currently writing a survey of science in the Enlightenment.Massimo Bucciantini is Professor of History of Science at the University of Siena. He is coeditor, with Michele Camerota, of Galilaeana: Journal of Galileo Studies. His publications include Galileo e Keplero (Einaudi, 2003; Les Belles Lettres, 2008), Italo Calvino e la scienza (Donzelli, 2007), and Auschwitz Experiment (Einaudi, 2011).Andrew J. Butrica, a former Chercheur Associé at the Centre de Recherches en Histoire des Sciences et Techniques in Paris, has published extensively on space history and has earned the Leopold Prize of the Organization of American Historians and the Robinson Prize of the National Council on Public History.Stefano Caroti is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Parma. His research interests include late medieval philosophy, particularly late scholastic debates on natural philosophy at the University of Paris.Chu Pingyi is a Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He has published widely on appropriations of Jesuit science and natural philosophy by their Chinese readers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China.J. T. H. Connor is John Clinch Professor of Medical Humanities and History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada. He is currently coeditor of the McGill-Queen's University Press History of Health, Medicine, and Society series. His latest book, a collection of essays coedited with Stephan Curtis entitled Medicine in the Remote and Rural North, 1800–2000, was published in 2011 by Pickering & Chatto in the Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine series.Scott DeGregorio is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. He specializes in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Latin literature, with a special focus on the Bible and its interpretation. He has published widely on the writings of Bede, most recently editing The Cambridge Companion to Bede.Michael Dettelbach has published widely on Alexander von Humboldt and is generally interested in science and culture in the revolutionary and Romantic eras. He directs Corporate and Foundation Relations at Boston University.Nadja Durbach is Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah. She is the author of Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England and Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture. She is now working on a book about beef, citizenship, and identity in modern Britain.David Edgerton is the Hans Rausing Professor, Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Imperial College London. His most recent book is Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2011; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University. Her publications include Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (California, 1994), and she has a long-standing interest in the relations between knowledge and faith in the age of Galileo.Maurice A. Finocchiaro is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His latest books are The Essential Galileo (Hackett, 2008) and Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 280) (Springer, 2010). He is now working on the Routledge Guidebook to Galileo's Dialogue.Mike Fortun is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the author of Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation (University of California Press, 2008).Stephen Gaukroger is Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Among his recent publications are The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210 to 1685 (Oxford University Press, 2005), and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680 to 1760 (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is now at work on the third volume in this series: The Naturalization of the Human and the Humanization of Nature: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1750 to 1825.Thomas F. Glick is Professor of History at Boston University. His two research fields are medieval technology (irrigation systems, water mills) and modern science (Darwin, Freud, and Einstein).Susana Gómez is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She is a specialist in seventeenth-century Italian science, with particular interests in atomism and experimental science. Much of her current work concerns issues about the representation of nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Frederick Gregory is Emeritus Professor of History of Science at the University of Florida. His research has dealt with the history of science and religion and with German science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is currently engaged in writing a biography of the nineteenth-century Moravian physicist-philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries.David E. Hahm is Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University. He is the author of The Origins of Stoic Cosmology and articles on Greek and Roman intellectual and cultural history, especially Hellenistic philosophy and historiography.Minghui Hu served as an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago from 2003 to 2005. He joined the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2005 and is now completing his book manuscript Cosmopolitan Confucians: The Passage to Modern Chinese Thought.Jeffrey Allan Johnson, Professor of History at Villanova University, has published mainly on the social and institutional history of chemical science and technology in modern Germany. Recently he was guest editor for Ambix, 2011, 58(2), a special issue on “Chemistry in the Aftermath of World Wars.”Jessica Keating is a Solmsen Fellow in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is writing a book entitled The Machinations of German Court Culture: Early Modern Automata.Peter C. Kjærgaard is Professor of Evolutionary Studies at Aarhus University. He has published widely in the history of modern science, including books on Wittgenstein and the sciences, the history of universities, and the history of science in Denmark. His current research focuses on the history and popular understanding of human evolution.David Knight has taught history of science at Durham University in England since 1964 and is a past President of the British Society for the History of Science. He published The Making of Modern Science in 2009 (Polity) and is writing a book on the Scientific Revolution.Bernard Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University, where he is Director of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies. He is also the Editor of the History of Science Society's flagship journal, Isis. His most recent publications include Victorian Popularizers of Science, Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain, and Science in the Marketplace (coedited with Aileen Fyfe). He is also general editor of a monograph series titled “Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century” published by Pickering & Chatto. He is currently working on a biography of John Tyndall and is one of the editors of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, an international collaborative effort to obtain, digitalize, transcribe, and publish all surviving letters to and from Tyndall.Pamela O. Long is a historian of late medieval/early modern history of science and technology. She is the coeditor and coauthor of The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript (MIT Press, 2009). Her books include Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (Oregon State University Press, 2011). She is at work on a history of engineering and knowledge in late sixteenth-century Rome.Morris Low is an associate professor of Japanese history at the University of Queensland, where he is Acting Head of the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies. He coedited a special issue of Historia Scientiarum (2011, 21[1]), and his recent books include Japan on Display (2006).Christine MacLeod is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism, and British Identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988).Paolo Mancosu is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main areas of interest are mathematical logic and history and philosophy of mathematics and logic. His current work is focused on the philosophy of mathematical practice. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow (2008) and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (2009).Hannah Marcus is a doctoral student studying history and the history of science at Stanford University. She is interested in the relationship between intellectual and religious culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy.David Meskill is an assistant professor of history at Dowling College on Long Island. His book Optimizing the German Workforce: Labor Administration from Bismarck to the Economic Miracle was published by Berghahn Books in 2010.John Pickstone is Wellcome Research Professor in the University of Manchester Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. His publications include Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Manchester University Press, 2000) and The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences, Volume 6 of the Cambridge History of Science (edited with Peter Bowler) (Cambridge University Press, 2009).Matthias Rieger is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology, Leibniz University, Hannover, and the author of Helmholtz Musicus: Die Objektivierung der Musik im 19. Jahrhundert durch Helmholtz' Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).Joy Rohde is Assistant Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio. Her research focuses on Cold War social science and politics. She is completing a book, under contract with Cornell University Press, titled The Social Scientists' War: Knowledge, Statecraft, and Democracy in the Era of Containment.William G. Rothstein is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of several books on American medical history, most recently Public Health and the Risk Factor (2003).Lisa T. Sarasohn is Professor of History at Oregon State University. Her latest publication is The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution (Johns Hopkins, 2010). She is working on a cultural history of insects in early modern England.Arne Schirrmacher teaches history of science at the Humboldt University in Berlin and is currently on leave at the University of California, Berkeley. His research concerns the history of the modern mathematical sciences, in particular quantum theory, the history of scientific socialization within student groups in Germany since 1850, and science communication in twentieth-century Europe.Petra G. Schmidl specialized in premodern astronomy in Islamic societies. Since 2009, she has worked as a research assistant at the University of Bonn. With Eva Orthmann and Mo˙hammad Karīmī Zanjānī A˙sl, she is investigating the Dustūr al-Munajjimīn as a source for the history of the Ismāʿīliyya and their astronomical and astrological concepts.Charlotte Schubert is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Leipzig. Her publications include Anacharsis der Weise: Nomade, Skythe, Grieche (2010), Der hippokratische Eid (2005), Hippokrates (coedited, 2006), and Frauenmedizin in der Antike (coedited, 1999).Vera Schwach is a historian and senior researcher at the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research, and Higher Education (NIFU). She has published analyses in science policy and has written extensively on the history of marine science, especially on fisheries biology and the management of sea fisheries in the Nordic countries and in Europe.Jonathan Seitz is an assistant teaching professor of history at Drexel University. He is particularly interested in vernacular ideas about nature and the supernatural in early modern Europe. His book, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press.Helaine Selin is Science Librarian and Faculty Associate in the School of Natural Sciences at Hampshire College. Her work includes editing The Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (Springer, 2008) and the series Science Across Cultures. Happiness Across Cultures is due out in Spring 2012.Efram Sera-Shriar received his Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. He is now working as a research associate on the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, organized by Montana State University and York University in Toronto.Asif A. Siddiqi is an associate professor of history at Fordham University. His most recent book is The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is now writing a book on the effects of the Stalinist purges on Soviet science and technology.Mark G. Spencer is Associate Professor of History at Brock University. His book, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (University of Rochester Press, 2005), was issued in a paperback edition in 2010. He is also current President of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society.Matthew Stanley is an associate professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he teaches and researches the history and philosophy of science. He is the author of Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington (Chicago, 2007), and he is now completing a manuscript on the history of science and religion in the Victorian period.John Steele is Associate Professor of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University. His recent publications include A Brief Introduction to Astronomy in the Middle East (Saqi Books, 2008) and Ancient Astronomical Observations and the Study of the Moon's Motion (1691–1757) (Springer, 2012). He is currently working on an edition and commentary of a newly discovered astrological compendium from Babylon.Larry Stewart is Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan. He is editing a book on the uses of humans in experiment and writing a study of experiment in the Enlightenment and the first industrial revolution.Bert Theunissen is Professor of the History of Science at the Institute for History and Foundations of Science, affiliated with the Descartes Centre for the History of the Sciences and the Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His current work focuses on the history of animal breeding, particularly on the interactions between scientific and practical workers in livestock breeding in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For his publications see http://www.descartescentre.com.Carsten Timmermann is a lecturer at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on issues in the history of modern medicine and biology, including chronic disease, cancer research, and pharmaceuticals.The Rev. Jeffrey P. von Arx, S.J., became the eighth President of Fairfield University in 2004. A historian by discipline, he is the author of numerous articles as well as the books Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harvard University Press, 1985) and Varieties of Ultramontanism (Catholic University Press, 1998). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.Michael Worboys is Director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine and the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester. He specializes in the history of infectious diseases as well as the application of research in clinical practices. He has recently started new work on dog breeding, feeding, training, and welfare from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. His publications include Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000 (with Neil Pemberton), and Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 103, Number 2June 2012 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/666369 © 2012 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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Guenter B Risse, New medical challenges during the Scottish Enlightenment, Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine, Clio Medica 78, Amsterdam and New York, Rodopi, 2005, pp. vi, 386, €80.00, $108.00 (hardback 90-420-1814-3). - Volume 51 Issue 2
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- 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2009.08.006
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Vaccinating Adolescents—New Evidence of Challenges and Opportunities
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Notes on Contributors
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- Jan 1, 2018
- Twentieth-Century China
Reviewed by: The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 by Bridie Andrews Xiaoping Fang Bridie Andrews. The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960. Contemporary Chinese Studies Series. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014. 294 pp. $99.00 (cloth). Repr. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015. 294 pp. $30.00 (paper). Western modernity as the single normative modernity has been the paradigm and criterion used to analyze and measure the rise of Chinese medicine in changing sociopolitical contexts. Within this narrative, the binary dichotomy between "Western" and "Chinese" medicine has been problematic. Bridie Andrews's The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine aims to break this dichotomy by examining the motives driving the active assimilation of Western medicine and the reasons for the rise of a new Chinese medicine. By analyzing the history of modern Chinese medicine, Andrews intends to shed light on the history of Western influences in non-Western societies and on the ways that science is perceived and performed as a marker of modernity. The book investigates the significant issues in modern Chinese medicine in chronological order. Chapters 2 and 3 mainly focus on medical practices up to the early twentieth century. The diverse spectrum of medical practice shows the coexistence of "modern" and "traditional" approaches to medicine and highlights the role of medical pluralism in the modernization process. From chapter 4 to chapter 8, the book analyzes how sociopolitical changes impacted Chinese medicine, facilitated responses to shifts in medical culture by early Chinese medical communities, the state, reformers, and medical professions, and contributed to the rise of modern Chinese medicine. The Japanese medical reform made a great impact on China's medical community and motivated the modern Chinese state to assume responsibility for public health care. Modern social and medical reformers integrated medicine into their struggles for sociopolitical change and the strengthening of Chinese medicine as an indigenous medicine. The rise of professional associations and the establishment of the National Quarantine Service became key events in the institutionalization of Western medicine in China, while the Chinese medical community underwent more significant institutionalization and professionalization. Western medicine also had a significant impact on modern Chinese medicine through the adoption of Western-style case histories and the relocation of acupuncture points in the new acupuncture. This book makes significant contributions to theoretical understandings of the history of Chinese medicine in modern China. Rather than upholding the dichotomy between Chinese and Western medicine, Andrews argues that the process was one of dynamic interactions and mutual impacts. She proposes a set of concepts to describe these effects: "translation" (or "appropriation") and "syncretism." The former involved "appropriat[ing] or translat[ing] elements of culture differently" and included missionary, European, and Japanese medical models for Chinese medicine. The latter implied a two-way exchange affecting both Western and Chinese medical practices, such as the West's curiosity regarding Chinese materia medica and Chinese practitioners' growing interest in Western medical practices and institutions [End Page E-17] (214). Andrews further suggests that "Chinese and Western medicines are two mirrors facing each other at a short distance. Each mirror holds the image not only of the other but also of the other's view of itself (216)." The book also greatly advances empirical understandings of three key issues in the history of medicine in China. First, it vividly reveals aspects of Western medical practice prior to its triumph and aggressiveness in the twentieth century that have been neglected up to this point. As the book shows, there were significant similarities between these and Chinese medicine, notably in the drug combinations used by both. Meanwhile, Western medical missionaries applied the strategy of "accommodation" to downplay the difference between their approach and that of Chinese medicine, such as looking for local substitutes for herbal medicines, comparing market prices, and adopting indigenous architectural styles for hospitals. Second, Andrews profoundly analyzes an important question about the rise of medical professionals with different training backgrounds and political inclinations and the emergence of different professional societies and associations. There were three medical associations by the establishment of the Nanjing Nationalist government in 1928: the China Medical Missionary Association (CMMA; also known as the China Medical Association...
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9
- 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1420
- Apr 30, 2020
- Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics
The study of think tanks brings together a range of academic disciplines and allows for multifaceted analyses, encompassing the concepts of ideas, institutions, influence, interests, and power. The literature on think tanks addresses a ubiquitous policy actor as think tanks have been around for a long time, especially in advanced liberal democracies. However, they have also become established actors in authoritarian regimes and in the developing world. Nowhere is their influence on policymaking or the public debate easy to pinpoint. The definition of a think tank has been contested ever since the study of think tanks took off in the 1980s and 1990s. Some scholars have devised typologies around organizational form and output, with a focus on whether think tanks are openly partisan or rather emphasize their political and ideological neutrality; others propose that the think tank is not so much a clearly discernible organizational entity but rather should be seen as a set of activities that can be conducted by a broad range of organizations; others again see think tanks as hybrid boundary organizations operating at the interstices of different societal fields. What most scholars will agree on is that policy expertise is think tanks’ main output, that they seek to influence policymakers and the wider public, and that they try to do so via informal and formal channels and by making use of their well-connected position in often transnational policy networks encompassing political parties, interest groups, corporations, international organizations, civil society organizations, and civil service bureaucracies. Think tanks’ main output, policy expertise either in the form of concrete proposals or “blue-skies thinking,” is underpinned by claims that it is “evidence-based.” The widely used positivist notion of “evidence-based policymaking” has been of benefit to think tanks as organizations that claim to “speak truth to power” by producing easily digestible outputs aimed at policymakers who profess to want evidence to make policy “that works.” Think tanks are active at different “moments” in the policymaking process. John Kingdon’s agenda-setting theory of the multiple streams framework helps us understand think tanks as “policy entrepreneurs” who are most likely to have influence during the moments of problem framing, the search for policy solutions, and the promotion of specific solutions to policymakers and the public. Think tank studies should take into account the relationship between the media and think tanks, and how this relationship impacts on whether think tanks succeed in agenda-setting and, thereby, influence policymaking. The relationship is symbiotic: journalists use think tanks to inform their work or welcome their contribution in the form of an opinion piece, while think tanks use the media to air their ideas. This relationship is not without problems, as some think tanks are in privileged positions with regards to media access while others barely ever cross the media threshold. Think tanks are, in the 21st century, challenged by an “epistemic crisis.” This crisis consists of a loss of faith in experts and of information pollution and information overload. This development is both a risk and an opportunity for think tanks. Concerning the latter, policymakers increasingly need curators, arbiters, or filters to help them decide which information, data, and policy expertise to use in their decision-making processes.
- Research Article
- 10.1086/681042
- Mar 1, 2015
- Isis
Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJon Agar is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University College, London. He is the author of Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Polity/John Wiley, 2012) and The Government Machine (MIT Press, 2003).Jennifer Karns Alexander is a historian of technology in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Program in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Mantra of Efficiency (Johns Hopkins, 2008), winner of the Society for the History of Technology's Edelstein Prize.Rachel A. Ankeny is a professor in the School of History and Politics at the University of Adelaide. She holds a master's in bioethics and a Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science; she specializes in history and philosophy of contemporary biology, particularly genetics, and worked in genetic counseling clinics in the 1980s.Theodore Arabatzis is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Athens. He is the author of Representing Electrons: A Biographical Approach to Theoretical Entities (University of Chicago Press, 2006), coeditor of Kuhn's “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” Revisited (Routledge, 2012), and coeditor of the journal Metascience.Massimiliano Badino is Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and MIT. He has worked on the history and philosophy of modern physics, particularly on Planck's theory of black-body radiation and on Boltzmann's statistical mechanics. His current research project deals with the evolution of the concepts of order and chaos in mathematical physics from the three-body problem to the ergodic theorem.Charlotte Bigg is a historian of science at the CNRS/Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris. She has coedited (with Jochen Hennig) Atombilder: Ikonografie des Atoms in Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit des 20. Jahrhunderts (Wallstein, 2009) and (with David Aubin and Otto Sibum) The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture (Duke, 2010).Christian Bracco is an associate professor at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis and a member of the team for history of astronomy at the Syrte Laboratory at the Paris Observatory. He specializes in the history of physics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and also contributes to pedagogical publications that address historical problematics.Massimo Bucciantini teaches history of science at the University of Siena. His publications include Galileo e Keplero (Einaudi, 2003; trans., Les Belles Lettres, 2008), Esperimento Auschwitz / Auschwitz Experiment (Primo Levi Lecture) (Einaudi, 2011), and Il telescopio di Galileo: Una storia europea (with M. Camerota and F. Giudice) (Einaudi, 2012; trans., Harvard University Press, 2015).Adelene Buckland is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at King's College, London. She is the author of Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago, 2013) and coeditor, with Beth Palmer, of A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900 (Ashgate, 2011).Conor Burns teaches history of science and technology courses at Ryerson University in Toronto. His current research examines American field sciences in the period 1780–1850, with a particular focus on archaeology and geology.Christián C. Carman is a professor and researcher at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, and a research member of the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET). He works on topics related to philosophy of science as well as the history of ancient astronomy.Imogen Clarke is an independent scholar. She is interested in early twentieth-century physics and culture, science publishing, and the ether.Harold J. (Hal) Cook is the John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University. He works mainly on early modern science and medicine and has published award-winning books, most recently Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale University Press, 2007).Ruth Schwartz Cowan is Janice and Julian Bers Professor Emerita of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening (Harvard, 2008). She is working on the sesquicentennial history of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council.Brendan Dooley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College, Cork. He has previously taught history of knowledge and history of science at Harvard, Notre Dame, and Jacobs University in Bremen. His current publications include Brill's Companion to Renaissance Astrology (2014), Renaissance Now! (Peter Lang, 2014), and A Mattress Maker's Daughter: The Renaissance Romance of Don Giovanni de' Medici and Livia Vernazza (Harvard, 2014).Sven Dupré is Professor of History of Knowledge at the Freie Universität Berlin and Research Group Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He is the editor of Laboratories of Art: Alchemy and Art Technology from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Springer, 2014).Richard England is Dean of the Sandra and Jack Pine Honors College and Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Illinois University. He is the coeditor (with Jude Nixon) of Victorian Science, Religion, and Natural Theology (2011) and one of three editors preparing an edition of the papers of the Metaphysical Society (1869–1880).James Evans is Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Puget Sound. His research interests include the history of physics from the eighteenth century to the recent past, as well as ancient astronomy.Paul Lawrence Farber is an Oregon State University Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He has written primarily on the history of natural history and is now working on the tangled questions on race mixing in the first half of the twentieth century. His most recent book is Mixing Races: From Scientific Racism to Modern Evolutionary Ideas (Johns Hopkins, 2011).Amy E. Foster is an associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida, where she teaches the history of science, technology, and medicine. Her research includes the history of women and technology, particularly women in the U.S. space program.Craig Fraser is Chair of the International Commission for the History of Mathematics and Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. His primary field of interest is the history of analysis and mathematical mechanics.Jean-François Gauvin is the Director of Administration for the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University. Since 2000 he has cowritten and coedited two prize-winning volumes as well as several articles and book reviews dealing with science museums, instruments, and instrument making. He teaches one course per semester at Harvard on the material culture of science.Alexa Geisthövel is a research associate at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, Charité Universitätsmedizin, Berlin. Her work is part of the ERC-funded research project “Ways of Writing: How Physicians Know, 1550–1950.”Francesco Gerali is a postdoctoral researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. A native Italian who works on the history of the early oil industry, he moved to Mexico in 2011 to study the development of Mexican oil between 1860 and 1920.Yves Gingras ([email protected]) is Professor in the Department of History and Canada Research Chair in History and Sociology of Science at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He was President of the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association (CSTHA) from 1988 to 1993 and Editor of Scientia Canadensis from 1995 to 2000. His most recent books are Sociologie des sciences (Presses Universitaires de France, 2012) and Les derives de l'évaluation de la recherché: Du bon usage de la bibliométrie (Raisons d'Agir, 2013). He is also the editor of Controverses: Accords et désaccords en sciences humaines et sociales (CNRS Éditions, 2014).Leila Gómez is Associate Professor of Latin American and Comparative Literatures at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She specializes in travel writing in Latin America; her publications include La piedra del escándalo: Darwin en Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2008), Iluminados y tránsfugas: Relatos de viajeros y ficciones nacionales en Argentina, Paraguay y Perú (Madrid, 2009), and Darwinism in Argentina: Major Texts (Lewisburg, 2011).Christopher D. Green is Professor of Psychology at York University, with cross-appointments to Science and Technology Studies and to Philosophy. His research is focused on turn-of-the-twentieth-century American psychology and on the use of digital methods in the history of science more broadly.Crystal Hall is Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Bowdoin College, where she is building a digital project on Galileo's personal library. She is the author of Galileo's Reading (Cambridge, 2013) and several articles on Galileo and literary studies in journals including Renaissance Quarterly and Quaderni d'Italianistica.Christopher Hamlin is Professor in the Department of History and the graduate program in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame and Honorary Professor in the Department of Public Health and Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His interests include natural theology, the history of public health, and the history of expertise. His most recent book is More Than Hot: A Short History of Fever (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).John Henry recently retired from the University of Edinburgh, where he had been Professor of the History of Science and Director of the Science Studies Unit. He has published widely in the history of science, including an introductory textbook, A Short History of Scientific Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).Jonathan B. Imber is Jean Glasscock Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. He has been Editor-in-Chief of Society since 1998. He is the author of Trusting Doctors: The Decline of Moral Authority in American Medicine (Princeton University Press, 2008).Catherine Jackson is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has published on Liebig, Hofmann, and nineteenth-century chemical laboratories and is the coeditor, with Hasok Chang, of An Element of Controversy: The Life of Chlorine in Science, Medicine, Technology, and War (2007).Danielle Jacquart is a professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris), where she holds the chair for “History of Sciences in the Middle Ages.” She is the author of numerous publications on medieval medicine. Among the most recent are “Anatomy, Physiology, and Medical Theory,” in The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 2: Medieval Science (2013); and Recherches médiévales sur la nature humaine: Essais sur la réflexion médicale (SISMEL, 2014).Frank A. J. L. James is Professor of History of Science at the Royal Institution and at University College, London. He recently completed the six-volume edition of the Correspondence of Michael Faraday and is now working on a study of Humphry Davy's practical work.Mark Jenner is Reader in Early Modern History and Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York. His publications include Londinopolis (Manchester, 2000) and Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850 (Palgrave, 2007). He completing a book on ideas of cleanliness and dirt in early modern England.Masanori Kaji is Associate Professor of the History of Science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. His research interests include history of chemistry in Russia and in Japan and environmental history. He is the author of Mendeleev's Discovery of the Periodic Law of Chemical Elements (1997).Vera Keller is an assistant professor at the Robert D. Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon. She is the author of over a dozen articles. Her first book, Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), explores the role of interest theory in the reshaping of research in early modern Europe.Sally Gregory Kohlstedt is a professor in the Program in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota. Her recent book, Hands-On Nature Study (2011), won the Margaret Rossiter Prize. She will spend her sabbatical year, 2014–2015, doing research on museum history at various sites, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.Brandon Konoval is on the faculty at the University of British Columbia, where he is cross-appointed in the Arts One Program and the School of Music. He has written most recently on Nietzsche and the Scopes trial for Perspectives on Science (2014) and on the relationship between Nietzsche and Foucault for Nietzsche-Studien (2013).Stefan Krebs, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Technology and Society Studies at Maastricht University, is the author of Technikwissenschaft als soziale Praxis (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008) and, with Karin Bijsterveld, Eefje Cleophas, and Gijs Mom, of Sound and Safe: A History of Listening Behind the Wheel (Oxford University Press, 2014).Kenton Kroker has published on the history of sleep research, experimental psychology, and clinical immunology. His current research project, Epidemic Futures, is a historical reconstruction of the encephalitis lethargica pandemics of the early twentieth century. He is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at York University in Toronto.Deepak Kumar teaches history of science and education at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. During the last four decades he has researched and published a great deal on the history of science, technology, and medicine in the context of British India. He is also known for his book Science and the Raj (Oxford, 2nd ed., 2006).Thomas C. Lassman is curator of the post–World War II rocket and missile collection at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution. His research interests focus on the history of U.S. industrial and military research and development and the history of weapon systems acquisition in the Department of Defense.Christoph Lehner works on history and philosophy of modern physics, especially quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He is a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the coordinator of the project “History and Foundations of Quantum Physics.”David Leith is an Advanced Research Fellow in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. His main research interests lie in Greco-Roman medicine, in particular its relations to ancient philosophy.Thomas Lessl is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Rhetorical Darwinism: Evolution, Religion, and the Scientific Identity (Baylor University Press, 2012).Mark Madison is Adjunct Professor at Shepherd University and the Chief Historian for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the National Conservation Training Center Museum/Archives.Anna Maerker is Senior Lecturer in History of Medicine at King's College, London. She works on the relationship between expertise and material culture in medicine and science and is the author of Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815 (2013).Jaume Navarro is Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country. He is the author, among other works, of A History of the Electron: J. J. and G. P. Thomson (Cambridge, 2012) and coeditor of Research and Pedagogy: A History of Quantum Physics through Its Textbooks (Berlin, 2013).Vivian Nutton is Emeritus Professor of the History of Medicine at University College, London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His recent publications include a revision of his Ancient Medicine (2013), the first English translation and commentary on Galen's Avoiding Distress (2013), and the historical introduction to the 2013 Karger translation of Vesalius's The Fabric of the Human Body.Mary Jo Nye is Professor of History Emerita at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Her most recent book is Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Her current research focuses on patterns of collaboration in twentieth-century chemical sciences.Giuliano Pancaldi is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Bologna. He is the author of Darwin in Italy (Indiana, 1991) and Volta (Princeton, 2003). He is now working on a study of the connections between the life sciences and the demographic transition circa 1900.Leigh Penman is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Unanticipated Millenniums: Chiliastic Thought in Post-Reformation Lutheranism (Springer, forthcoming) and numerous articles in the areas of early modern religious and intellectual history.Michael Pettit is Associate Professor of Psychology and Science and Technology Studies at York University. His first book is The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013). He studies the history of psychology's research methods and ethics, the relationship between scientists and subject populations, the interface between psychology and public policy, and the circulation of psychology in the public sphere.Patricia Princehouse is a member of the Department of History and Director of the Program in Evolutionary Biology, Institute for the Science of Origins, Case Western Reserve University.Monica Saavedra is a research fellow at the Centre for Global Health Histories, University of York. She has worked in the fields of medical anthropology and the history of medicine and has published about vaccination and malaria in former Portuguese India and Portugal.C. F. Salazar, previously the Editor-in-Chief of Brill's New Pauly, is a research associate at both the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, working on translations of works by Galen and Aetius of Amida, respectively.George Saliba is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science at Columbia University and studies the development of scientific ideas from late antiquity to early modern times. His most recent book is Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (MIT Press, 2007; paperback, 2011).Darya Serykh is a Ph.D. student in Social and Political Thought at York University. Her current research focuses on the production of queer discourses in the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.Megan K. Sethi is an adjunct professor at Southern New Hampshire University. Her work examines the educational activities of scientists who promoted nuclear arms control during the early Cold War era. She participated in the Wilson Center's SHAFR Summer Institute on the International History of Nuclear Weapons in 2013.Michael H. Shank is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the coeditor, with David Lindberg, of the Cambridge History of Science, Volume 2: Medieval Science (2013).Elise Juzda Smith has written on the history of craniology, anthropometry, and scientific racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently a Teaching and Research Fellow in the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford.Richard Staley lectures in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Einstein's Generation and the Relativity Revolution (Chicago, 2008), and his current research explores physics and anthropology.Heiko Stoff is Guest Professor for the History of Science and Technology at the Technical University of Braunschweig. He has published on the history of rejuvenation (Ewige Jugend: Konzepte der Verjüngung vom späten 19. Jahrhundert bis ins Dritte Reich [Böhlau, 2004]) and the history of biologically active substances (Wirkstoffe: Eine Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Hormone, Vitamine und Enzyme, 1920–1970 [Stuttgart, 2012]). He is the editor, with Alexander von Schwerin and Bettina Wahrig, of Biologics: A History of Agents Made from Living Organisms in the Twentieth Century (Pickering & Chatto, 2013).Liba Taub is Director and Curator of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include Aetna and the Moon: Explaining Nature in Ancient Greece and Rome, Ancient Meteorology, and Ptolemy's Universe: The Natural Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Ptolemy's Astronomy.Jetze Touber is a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University. His Ph.D. dissertation, on the cult of the saints and law, medicine, and in Rome, has recently been published by His research interests include in the Dutch and and in the of is Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of and the author of The Science and Technology is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of New and the author of in The of American and the of the and Conservation in America (University of Chicago is Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His research focuses on the history of ancient and early modern mechanics and on the between practical and knowledge in the history of a historian of ancient and medieval Islamic and is coordinator of at University and of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of He is author of The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth: The Early History of (Princeton, 2009) and The Art of (Princeton, is Senior Lecturer in the History of Science in the Department of History at University. His research focuses on the early modern between and He has published on the history of and astronomy and is now preparing work on early modern and on the of A. is an assistant professor of history at University and teaches in the industrial archaeology graduate program His work is between early modern and and the history of nineteenth-century American military technology and the that J. is an assistant professor of history at The University of the and the author of The as Scientific and in the Early Enlightenment (Chicago, An early who specializes in the history of science, she has published widely on and and education in the first half of the eighteenth century. She is working on a project about the history of the in early modern is Assistant Professor of History of Art at State University. He is a in medieval and the history of His first book, de and the Medieval in from the Institute in is Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of and Research Associate at King's College, Cambridge. Her current research project focuses on the of culture, medicine, and the role of in science, Previous article by Volume of the History of Science Society on by The History of Science articles
- Research Article
- 10.1086/653928
- Mar 1, 2010
- Isis
Notes on Contributors
- Supplementary Content
39
- 10.1016/s0140-6736(15)60108-8
- Jan 1, 2015
- The Lancet
The historical epidemiology of global disease challenges