Books by Author

Taking Place deals with places shaped by interactions of science, technology, and industry. It treats place as an essential factor for understanding municipalities, companies, scientists, and scientific institutions. It discusses, by means of historical and contemporary examples, the embodiment of ideas and power relationships in architectural structures, and how the creation of organized places can create […]

Contributors: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Anders Lundgren, Brigitte Van Tiggelen, Roman Mierzecki,Lissa Roberts, David Knight, Arthur Donovan, John McEvoy, A.M.Amorim da Costa, Agustí Níeto-Galan, Patricia Aceves, Anne Claire Déré, Marco Beretta, Ferdinando Abbri, F.L. Holmes. Countries discussed include: Belgium, Poland, Holland, Sweden, England, Scotland, Portugal, Spain, Mexico, France, and Italy. Complete contents upon request.

Recipient of the Paul-Bunge-Prize for 2013

Contributors include: Tiziana Bascelli, Jean-François Battail, Marco Beretta, Janet Browne, Robert Darnton, Lorraine Daston, Paolo Galluzzi, Karl Grandin, John L. Heilbron, Daniel J. Kevles, Svante Lindqvist, Thorsten Nybom, Mary Jo Nye, Sheldon Rothblatt, Nicolaas A. Rupke, William R. Shea, H. Otto Sibum, and Sven Widmalm.

In December 1788, the painter Jacques Louis David completed his famous portrait of Lavoisier and his wife. While it has long been believed that this portrait is the only authentic image of Lavoisier, on the basis of some unpublished or little-known iconographic representations, this book questions the truth of this opinion and shows that Lavoisier […]

Today it is routine to ask scientists, engineers, and medical researchers to face up to their ethical and social responsibilities. Surely social scientists, too have seen themselves challenged by an analogous demand, yet it seems that they have experienced less social pressure than their colleagues from the aforementioned disciplines. Who has ever asked scholars engaged […]

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 […]

Winner of the 2007 Ferguson Prize. All other volumes in the series are still available. Click here for contents, prices and description information. Additional information is available from The Joseph Henry Papers Project: http://www.siarchives.si.edu/history/jhp/jhenry.html

See also The Physicians’ Crusade Against Abortion

How and why, after many years of waiting, did Albert Einstein finally receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921, awarded the following year? On the basis of a penetrating study of documents in the Nobel archive at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, the author reviews the sixty nominations Einstein received from […]

“Bartolomeo Eustachio (1520-1574) was one of the great anatomists of all time. In many ways his anatomical studies were more detailed and comprehensive than those of his more famous contemporary Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), but his major studies remained unknown until their eventual publication in Amsterdam in the beautiful edition of 1714…Eustachio’s contributions to the development […]

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 idea for this book took shape on a business trip to Ceylon the author made with Christopher Ondaatje, the brother of Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje. In the 1780′s two of their ancestors had championed the popular movement which brought to the Dutch Republic the first democratically elected government in Europe, a few years […]

The four nordic countries-Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden-although different in character share a common history. During some period two or three of them were joined politically. Today, they are all independent states but with close economic and cultural ties. They are modern, industrialized countries, depending to an ever-increasing degree on ties to the rest of […]

Norwegian medicine viewed from the inside– Because it possess detailed records on the life and career of virtually every one of its physicians from the earliest times until the present day, Norway is able to make a special contribution to the history of professional development. Based on this biographical information and an extensive amount of […]

*Major portions of this book originally appeared in Cultures of Creativity: The Centennial Exhibition of the Nobel Prize published in 2001 and copyright Science History Publications/USA & The Nobel Museum. The book was first published in Swedish, Människor, miljöer och kreativitet: Nobelpriset 100 dr, earlier the same year. A revised English edition appeared in 2002. The current edition […]

William C. Moloney began practicing hematology long before it became a recognized medical specialty. Developing an interest in the disorders of the blood soon after graduating from Tufts Medical School in 1932, he spent the next six decades contributing to many of the advances that helped elevate the treatment and research of the diseases of […]

This remarkable book is the autobiography of one of the 20th century’s most honored surgeons, Joseph E. Murray, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990. In it, Dr. Murray describes his role in breakthrough research in human organ transplantation and his pioneering advances in surgical techniques to correct deformities of the […]

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 […]

Volume 2, The Princeton Years: November 1832-December 1835 (Washington, 1975: ISBN 0-87474-164-5) concerns Henry’s adjustment to a small college town and his attempts to develop a first-rate facility for teaching and research in the physical sciences. It details his excursions to New York City and Philadelphia in search of scientific apparatus and scientific fellowship, and reveals the […]

Volume 4, The Princeton Years: January 1838-December 1840 (Washington, 1981: ISBN 0-87474-792-9) demonstrates Henry’s growing concern with the nation’s intellectual image abroad. After returning from Europe, he was increasingly sensitive to American shortcomings, particularly to the problem of scientific charlatanism. His opposition to the physician-inventor Henry Hall Sherwood, documented in the volume, epitomized this delicate issue. His […]

In the second half of the twentieth century, chemistry underwent a profound transformation. Its object of examination, the chemical substance, was transmuted into abstract structure; its most important method, the chemical reaction, was supplemented by physical methods; and its practitioner, the chemist, was partially displaced by technical instruments. At the center of this transformation were […]

Volume 6, The Princeton Years: January 1844-December 1846 (Washington, 1992: ISBN 1-56098-112-1) further develops the theme of Henry as a consultant on technological problems of his day. He provided expert advice on the acoustics of public buildings, the protection of buildings from lightning, the electromagnetic telegraph, and Colt’s submarine battery. He also chaired the Franklin Institute committee […]

Volume 8, The Smithsonian Years: January 1850-December 1853 (Washington, 1998: ISBN 1-56098-891-6) reveals a difficult period in Henry’s life. During these years, he suffered constant personal and financial woes, clashed with subordinates, and faced significant public criticism of his leadership. When Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois attacked the Smithsonian for its preoccupation with research of “no […]

The period covered by this volume included some of the darkest years Joseph Henry would ever face. The country was torn apart by a devastating civil war. Washington was threatened with invasion, placing the Smithsonian Institution in jeopardy. Henry’s only son, William, died in 1862 from a sudden illness. Henry’s mentor and confidant, Alexander Dallas […]

Edited and with notes by Whitfield J. Bell, Jr. and L. H. Butterfield. Published in association with the Rosenback Foundation, Philadelphia.

Also in paperback

Paperback. A hardcover edition is available. During his comparatively brief life (he died at thirty-nine, the age Mozart was to die) Blaise Pascal devoted his unusual talents to mathematics, physics and religion. His religious views are still widely discussed, and the general interest in this aspect of his life may be responsible for the fact […]

“The list of sources for the history of fire fighting in the seventeenth century is frustratingly short. What information there is largely comes from doleful accounts of the conflagrations of the day. Their authors pay only fleeting attention to the tactics, organizations, or types of fire equipment used, concentrating isntread on the number of buildings […]

An increasing amount of Virchow’s work has been translated into English in the last decade, and the present work on pulmonary embolism is yet another welcome example. For those readers who cannot really appreciate the breadth of his vision or the depth of his learning so evident in his voluminous writings in German, they will […]

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 […]