Books by Title

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.

See also The Physicians’ Crusade Against Abortion

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“…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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A 1929 graduate of the Harvard Medical School and by 1932 Chief Surgical Resident at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Herbert Dan Adams relates with colorful language and lively description the story of the Lahey Clinic as he saw and lived it from 1929, when he encountered Dr. Lahey, until 1969, when he retired as the [...]

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

Also in hardcover

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

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 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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Published by the Boston Medical Library/ Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine; WPI sole commercial distributor.

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” [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]