Mixing up the medicine: Garcia de Orta on the problems with Eurocentric philosophy

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.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

The most famous American medical practitioner from the 1820s to mid-century was the botanical healer Samuel Thomson (1769-1843). Yet today he is considered a minor figure, partly because no significant botanical movement survived past the nineteenth century. Thomson was also part of the empirical rather than the learned tradition in medicine. He characterized his philosophy as "the study of patients, not books--experience, not reading" (p. 92). Many historians of medicine, like historians of science and technology, downplay the empirical tradition.

The situation of the history of science and, in particular, of the history of medicine in Italy reflects some contradictions that are typical of the discipline. Researchers from a variety of fields work in the history of medicine. Doctors, biologists, historians, sociologists, philosophers and philologists are the main actors in the discipline. Very often in Italy the different methodologies are not harmonized into an interdisciplinary approach, with the result that there are various strands to the history of medicine that have not yet come together. On one side there are the histories written by doctors, which focus mainly on medical ideas, theories and technical concepts; on another there is a more general approach to the history of ideas, in which medical theories are studied in relation to philosophy and culture; and on yet another there are some historians—still rare in Italy—that concentrate on sociology or philology. In general these three approaches, of the technical and the more general history of ideas, and the history of the conditions of the production of such ideas—that is, the history of society and language—have not yet converged. The University of Bari is one of two institutions in Italy that offers a PhD in history of science (the other is Florence and there are also some possibilities at Bologna and Naples). As a consequence, Bari has the advantage of appealing to many researchers from a variety of fields, and of supporting an interdisciplinary approach in history of science and medicine. Over the last few years, the Interdepartmental Centre of History of Science in Bari has promoted a computational analysis of scientific languages for historical purposes. Researchers at the Centre have created software that allows users to take a document converted into an electronic format (txt) and scan it for exact word position and frequency. The first two significant publications resulting from the application of this type of software are: Jean-Martin Charcot e la lingua della neurologia by Liborio Dibattista (Cacucci, Bari 2003), and Le Recherches physiologique sur la vie et la mort di Francois Xavier Bichat, the text reviewed here, which studies Bichat's physiology. Charcot and Bichat are considered the founders of two disciplines: neurology and physiology respectively. The basic hypothesis of both texts is that the creation of a new discipline corresponds to the creation of a new language, the analysis of which can give us further indications of the processes by which the new discipline has arisen. The software that Lucia di Palo has used is INTEX (created specifically for the French language), by which it is possible to find, for each word, the more frequent correspondences with other words, verbs or constructions. By analysing the words function, organ, and ownership, which appear very frequently in Bichat's Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort, di Palo tries to analyse how Bichat built a new physiology. This physiology is based upon the concepts of animal and natural vital functions and upon the experimental analysis of the ownership of these functions. The organs, built by specific tissues, are the seats of these functions and through experimental analysis it is possible to understand how each function is put to use, that is, the nature of the ownership of each organ. The experimental analysis is lead by the selective suppression of the function of an organ in a given animal and by the observation of the functions that as a result are suppressed. Di Palo analyses also the experimental language of Bichat, in which we find a new relationship between observation and experimentation. Experimentation and observation are no longer in contrast, as in previous French natural philosophy, because Bichat presents the experiment as a more wide ranging form of observation. The most valuable aspects of di Palo's book are, first, that it gives quantitative proof concerning the way in which this new physiology emerges, based on a computational analysis of the language (the book is sold with a DVD containing the results), and, second, this analysis is placed in a classical historical perspective, offering some excellent chapters on the culture, medicine and philosophy of Bichat's epoch. The only drawback to this focus on linguistic analysis is that the complete conceptual explanation of Bichat's text is not given due consideration.

Notes on Contributors

Anestésicos Locais: Como Escolher e Previnir Complicações Sistémicas

At risk of overstatement a physician and historian of medicine, Chester R. Burns, the past President of the Society for Health and Human Values, remarked that “Contemporary man is transforming death from a taboo to an obscenity” ([5], p. 3). As he rightly observes, there are books, articles, symposia, editorials, societies, panel discussions, political caucuses expressing ideologies and hospices. Distinguishing as we should the phenomenon of death from the concept and language in which the concept reveals itself, it is the latter which is in danger of becoming indecent, impure, and even obscene. The phenomenon of death was never taboo. However, only the explicit bringing to consciousness of the latent affect associated with the phenomenon was forbidden. Indeed, in many quarters the topic is still very much taboo, in spite of the fact that many of us move in circles where the phenomenon of death is “discussed.” We should not, after all, assume that our particular social nexus is typical. In truth it is more correct to say that authentic and open talk about death is still taboo and, especially in academic circles, at times even obscene. The reality, in short, is expressed by the conjunctive.KeywordsChronic PainAncient ClinicHospice CareTherapeutic CommunityAssisted SuicideThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Reviewed by: Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 6, Biology and Biological Technology. Part 6, Medicine Mary Tiles (bio) Joseph Needham. Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 6, Biology and Biological Technology. Part 6, Medicine. Assisted by Lu Gwei-Djen. Edited by Nathan Sivin. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xviii, 261 pp. Hardcover $80.00, ISBN 0-521-63262-5. This volume consists of essays written by Joseph Needham and his longtime collaborator Lu Gwei-djen, mostly between 1939 and 1970, together with an introductory essay by the editor, Nathan Sivin. Needham and Lu had intended to write a comprehensive survey of the many aspects of Chinese medicine but were unable to complete it. Nathan Sivin justifies publishing this material as the representation of medicine in the Science and Civilisation in China series on the ground that no one else is yet ready to survey the whole history of medicine in a manner that retains the standards of the series. Sivin, who has himself published on Chinese medicine (Medicine, Philosophy, and Religion in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections [Aldershot: Variorum, 1995]) as well as many other aspects of Chinese science, has revised all the essays to incorporate the results of recent research and to cite pertinent publications. The essays included in this volume cover the position of medicine in Chinese culture, the origins of qualifying examinations in medicine, hygiene, and preventive medicine, and the origins of immunology and forensic medicine. They do not include material from Needham's and Lu's book-length study of acupuncture, its history and scientific rationale, published as Celestial Lancets (Cambridge University Press, 1980). In this volume the discussion of acupuncture is very brief. Sivin himself is critical of some of the assumptions that underlie Needham's work on Chinese science and civilization. Of particular relevance to his interpretations of Chinese medicine are the convictions (1) that the borders between science, magic and religion were heavily traveled, (2) that before modern times this was beneficial to science, (3) that Taoism was particularly responsible for originating scientific attitudes and accomplishments in China, and (4) that with the scientific revolution in Europe, modern science has transcended the bounds of any particular culture, making it absoluting international. In the Chinese context these convictions lead Needham to treat technology as science. As Sivin puts it, many of Needham's arguments about the influence of Taoism have not "aged gracefully." Scholars of religion now question the view that there was in China any unified natural philosophy / religious movement or "ism" to be labeled "Taoism" and viewed as the legacy of the Lao Tzu and the Chuang Tzu. Needham's positivist view of modern science as independent of culture leads him to seek in China for what are recognized as achievements in Western science and, frequently, to claim that the Chinese got there first, or at least independently. [End Page 220] Often this argument is based, as in the case of the discussion of immunology, on the use of techniques or technologies in China, rather than on theoretical writings. More recent historians of science and medicine tend to view priority disputes and claims about superiority with suspicion and as irrelevant to the main business of their disciplines, namely understanding the complex interactions over time between various aspects of society and disciplines and practices such as those of medicine. Sivin offers (p. 21) a list of research questions whose investigation would in his opinion serve as providing the first steps toward a comprehensive history of Chinese medicine, questions such as "What were the social settings of medical practice and scholarship? Were these separate activities? If so, how were they related? If not, how were they articulated to form a single complex?" Sivin is thus presenting Needham and Lu's work as a starting point that needs to be superseded, and has suggested research avenues and supplied the up-to-date references that would enable one to make that start. This is very useful. On the other hand, it does create a rather curious framework within which to read Needham and Lu's pieces. After all of the critical comments, one almost wonders why one should bother to read them...

Norbert Marxer, Praxis statt Theorie! Leben und Werk des Nürnberger Arztes, Alchemikers und Fachschriftstellers Johann Hiskia Cardilucius (1630–1697), Studien und Quellen zur Kulturgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit, vol. 1, Heidelberg, Palatina, 2000, pp. 285, DM 88.01, SFr 78.00 €45.00 (hardback 3-932608-07-0). - Volume 48 Issue 4

It is my aim in this paper to discuss some aspects of the relationship between medieval medical authors and classical authorities. Historians of medicine have stressed the academic activities of medical masters as those of conciliation and explanation of authority. I will rather suggest that the explanation of classical authority was not the main aim of the medical masters but, in fact, its very construction. I would like to develop this possibility by analysing the nature of the approach to visual perception in academic medical circles at the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century.

In 1712 the poet Elkanah Settle (1648–1724) published a funeral poem, Threnodia Apollinaris , dedicated to the memory of Dr Martin Lister.[1][1] Settle had a good deal of material to draw upon, because Lister had been Vice-President of the Royal Society, a physician to Queen Anne, and the first

Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print