Books by Author

Det Kongelige Norske VidenskabersSelskab—The Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters—was established in 1760 in the city of Trondheim, Norway. This makes it among the oldest of its kind in the Nordic countries and the by far the oldest one in Norway. The present volume celebrates its 250th anniversary and is the first comprehensive study [...]

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 [...]

Digital Library of Italian editions of Linnaeus Uppsala Studies in History of Science, Volume 34

Published in 1975 and often cited as a significant contribution to the establishment of history of science as a discipline within the academic community, this paperback reprint of a long out of print title, including a brief preface by the surviving editor, reaffirms many of its primary scholarly objectives while commemorating the 40th anniversary of [...]

“…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” [...]

Tells the quintessentially American story of Billings and his achievements in gripping fashion, with glimpses of his defects as well as his virtues.

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 [...]

About the Author  Appointed Headmaster of Saint James School in June of 1992 when he was only 33 years old, the Revd. Dr. D. Stuart Dunnan has presided over a remarkable revival of this historic Episcopal boarding school in Western Maryland. A teacher and chaplain at both the school and university levels before he came [...]

Read Chapter 22 See also Champion of Women and the Unborn

CURRENTLY OUT OF STOCK Paperback edition is scheduled for publication in early May 2013. Should you wish to be kept posted regarding the publication schedule, add your email below. 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 [...]

This limited English edition dedicated to, among others, the late Bern Dibner, contains a fascinating account of what little is known of Turriano and of the history of clock and automata making in the 16th century. Many illustrations. A few copies of the paperback edition remain. Contact Customer Service for availability.

Best known as the surgeon in Oliver Hazard Perry’s squadron during the War of 1812 and as a participant in the Battle of Lake Erie, Parsons remained in the Navy for nearly ten years. After obtaining a degree from the Harvard Medical School in 1818, he separated from the service and settled in Providence, Rhode [...]

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 [...]

The steam engine came to Sweden as something of a paradox: both as a solution and at the same time a threat. It promised to meet industry’s need for mechanical energy, but it also threatened the limited resources of thermal energy. Part 1 is a study of this issue in Sweden as a whole during [...]

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 [...]

Volume 1, The Albany Years: December 1797-October 1832 (Washington, 1972: ISBN 0-87474-123-8) deals with the formative years of Henry’s career. It documents the influence of the Albany, New York, milieu on his scientific growth, and traces the origin and early development of the Albany Academy, where Henry studied and taught, and the Albany Institute, the forum for [...]

Volume 3, The Princeton Years: January 1836-December 1837 (Washington, 1979: ISBN 0-87474-174-2) focuses on Henry’s travels to the principal scientific centers of Great Britain and France. During his stay, Henry attended lectures at technical societies, and toured lighthouses, harborworks, and railroad facilities. His diary entries contain appraisals of such European luminaries as J. L. Gay-Lussac, Mary Somerville, [...]

Volume 5, The Princeton Years: January 1841-December 1843 (Washington, 1985: ISBN 0-87474-793-7) provides a detailed picture of Henry’s daily life as a college professor and leader of the American scientific community: teaching, experimenting, presenting his results to his peers, and lecturing to the public. In addition to continuing his research on electromagnetism, he investigated such phenomena as [...]

In this final volume of The Papers of Joseph Henry, Henry emerges as the unrivaled leader of American science and the nation’s foremost proponent of funding for basic scientific research. Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution since its founding in 1846, Henry guides its recovery from the Civil War while reshaping it by reducing or eliminating programs [...]

Volume 7, The Smithsonian Years: January 1847-December 1849 (Washington, 1996: ISBN 1-56098-533-X) documents the beginning of the most influential period of Henry’s life, his thirty-one years as Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. During these years, Henry strove to ensure that James Smithson’s bequest was used to support original scientific research and publication, rather than to create a [...]

In 1854 the Smithsonian faced a crisis that threatened to tear the eight-year-old institution apart when Secretary Joseph Henry and Assistant Secretary Charles C. Jewett publicly clashed over its future direction. Before their dispute was settled, battles had been fought at regents’ meetings, in newspapers and literary journals in New York, Boston, and Washington, and [...]

Ideas migrate across time and space, sometimes in conjunction with the migration of people and sometimes independently of it. The migration of ideas from one context to another is a central aspect of communication among scholars and scientists. It is one of the most important features of cultural, intellectual and scientific history. It is also [...]

An instrument can change the world and compel us to rethink our place in the universe. The telescope did just this, but only when it was used by Galileo, whose eye was prepared to see new things and whose hand was able to depict what he saw. It was not only because Galileo was a [...]

Also in hardcover

Hardcover. A paperback edition is also 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 [...]

“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 [...]