History of Medicine

The Accademia del Cimento, organized in Florence under Medici patronage, devoted itself for ten years (1657-1667) to the experimental investigation of a broad range of scientific matters, and provided a model and inspiration for many subsequent scientific societies. Despite its crucial position in the history of science, the Cimento’s work and diverse membership has remained […]

“…All but one of the six conditions to be discussed in this book were once common in what has now come to be designated as developed countries, the Western world. They are diseases that reflect the ravages of poverty, ignorance, famine, superstition and bigotry, but the resolution of their mystery and the development of preventive […]

Sex in History: A Virgin Field; Attitudes toward Deviant Sex in Ancient Mesopotamia; Homosexuality as Submissive Behavior: Examples from Mythology; Medieval Medical and Scientific View of Woman; Transvestites in the Middle Ages; Heresy, Witchcraft, and Sexuality; An Early American Sex Manual; Problems and Methods for Research in Prostitution; Homosexuality and Its Confusion with “Secret Sin” […]

Born in Rhode Island in 1754, hailed in Great Britain and much of the United States, yet scorned by the medical and Brahmin establishments in Boston, Benjamin Waterhouse is one of the most important, controversial, and colorful figures in American medical history. Best known for introducing vaccination to the United States and joining with Thomas […]

This personal account of Edward D. Churchill’s Moseley Travelling Fellowship for the academic year 1926-1927, taken from interviews recorded by Saul Benison, provides a unique view of the state of thoracic surgery in the institutions he visited and the conditions in Germany between the two World Wars. These included Blair Bell in Liverpool; Berlin and […]

Read Chapter 22 See also Champion of Women and the Unborn

In modern America, where the triumph over disease is often taken for granted and yellow fever has ceased to be a menace, it is difficult to appreciate the fear once engendered by this disease. The 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic was no mere round of sickness but a major public health emergency that paralyzed city […]

Unique as the only occasion on which social historians, intellectual historians, historians of psychology and psychiatry, and a number of those who participated in making that history met to focus upon the development of American psychiatry in a particular region during a specific era, the experiences recounted in this volume portray a microcosm of American […]

The remarkable story of a man born on a small ranch in an obscure part of the northern Great Plains who became a major figure in medical science, education, and administration, and to whom patients suffering from leukemia and related diseases, patients with successful bone marrow transplants, and people with chronic kidney disease owe a […]

The third supplement to the Isis Cumulative Bibliography, 1913-1965, edited by Magda Whitrow cumulates the annual bibliographies published in the History of Science Society’s journal Isis in the years 1986 through 1995. The increase in the literature during the last decade necessitates publication in four volumes: Volume One (496pp.), Persons : A–L; Volume Two (480pp.), […]

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) spent parts of the nineteenth century as America’s best-known physician and best-selling author. Sir William Osler praised him as “the most successful combination which the world has ever seen, of the physician and man of letters.” Henry James, Sr., called him “intellectually the most alive man I ever knew.” Today, he […]

Chymistry (that is, alchemy and early chemistry) is currently receiving an unprecedented amount of scholarly attention. Long-held misunderstandings are being replaced by a wealth of fresh perspectives and discoveries, as scholars progressively reveal alchemy’s crucial place in early modern culture and its contributions to early modern science. This volume brings together the most recent work […]

This is the autobiography of Thomas H. Weller, M.D., a research scientist who helped develop the technique of growing viruses in tissue culture, and who became a world leader in the study of tropical diseases. The development of tissue-culture techniques transformed the field of virology. It led to the identification of many new infectious agents—several […]

Horace Wells has come to be viewed over the years as an enigmatic figure. Owing to his death by suicide in early 1848, and his inability to participate in the debate that soon erupted over credit for the discovery of anesthesia, the literature on him is confused, fragmentary and incomplete. While he is considered by […]