This book reconnects health and thought, as the two were treated together in the seventeenth century, and by reuniting them, it adds a significant dimension to our historical understanding. Indeed, there is hardly a single early modern figure who took a serious interest in one but not the other, with their attitudes toward body-mind interaction often revealed in acts of self-diagnosis and experimentation. The essays collected here specifically reveal the way experiment and especially self-experiment, combined with careful attention to the states of mind which accompany states of body, provide a new means of assessing attitudes to body-mind interactions just as they show the abiding interest and relevance of source material typically ignored by historians of science and historians of philosophy. In the surviving records of such experimenting on one’s own body, we can observe leading figures like Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, deliberately setting out to repeat pleasurable, or intellectually productive moods and states of mind, by applying the same medicine on successive occasions. In this way we can witness theories of the working of the human mind being developed by key members of an urban culture (London; interregnum Oxford) who based those theories in part on their own regular, long-term use of self-administered, mind-altering substances. It is hardly an overstatement to claim that there was a significant drug culture in the early modern period linked to self-experimentation, new medicines, and the new science. This is one of the many things this volume has to teach us.

Situated at the vital intersection of physiology, gastronomy, decorum, knowledge-production, and labor, recipes from the past allow us to understand the significant ways that kitchen work was an intellectual and creative enterprise.

Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of scientific networks – local and long-distance, informal and institutional, religious and secular – as one of the important phenomena of the early modern world. It seeks to answer questions about what role these networks played in making knowledge, how information traveled, how it was transformed by travel, and who the brokers of this world were. Bringing together an international group of historians of science and medicine, this book looks at the changing relationship between knowledge and community in the early modern period through case studies connecting Europe, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. It explores a landscape of understanding (and misunderstanding) nature through examinations of well-known intelligencers such as overseas missions, trading companies, and empires while incorporating more recent scholarship on the many less prominent go-betweens, such as translators and local experts, which made these networks of knowledge vibrant and truly global institutions. Empires of Knowledge is the perfect introduction to the global history of early modern science and medicine.

A unique biographical review of the global contributors to field of anatomy Knowledge of human anatomy has not always been an essential component of medical education and practice. Most European medical schools did not emphasize anatomy in their curricula until the post-Renaissance era; current knowledge was largely produced between the 16th and 20th centuries. Although not all cultures throughout history have viewed anatomy as fundamental to medicine, most have formed ideas about the internal and external mechanisms of the body—influences on the field of anatomy that are often overlooked by scholars and practitioners of Western medicine. History of Anatomy: An International Perspective explores the global and ancient origins of our modern-day understanding of anatomy, presenting detailed biographies of anatomists from varied cultural and historical settings. Chapters organized by geographic region, including Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, review the lives of those that helped shape our current understanding of the human form. Examining both celebrated and lesser-known figures, this comprehensive work examines their contributions to the discipline and helps readers develop a global perspective on a cornerstone of modern medicine and surgery. Offers a comprehensive and multidisciplinary examination of the history of anatomy Traces the emergence of modern knowledge of anatomy from ancient roots to the modern era Fills a gap in current literature on global perspectives on the history of anatomy Written by an internationally recognized team of practicing physicians and scholars History of Anatomy: An International Perspective is an engaging and insightful historical review written for anatomists, anthropologists, physicians, surgeons, medical personnel, medical students, health related professionals, historians, and anyone interested in the history of anatomy, surgery, and medicine.

Is the life unexamined by the fMRI not worth living? Can biology replace the humanities in capturing what it means to be human? Biomythology levels the playing field of skepticism, doing for Darwin and science what Richard Dawkins has attempted for God and religion. This irreverent romp reasons: "Once upon a time there were nine planetsscientific truth rests on the faith that future discoveries will not turn today's facts into tomorrow's fairytales." "Science is the art of arranging observations to fit theory. When applied to alter minds rather than matter, the evidence can be as convincing as a serial killer's smile on your first date." "With prenatal testing building better bell curves by controlling the gateway to our brave new world, eugenics is thriving." Biomythology will teach the skeptic to recognize over twenty rhetorical devices of scientific persuasion that can be borrowed to change our worldviews rather than the world we view.

Embodiment, Expertise, and Ethics in Early Modern Europe highlights the agency and intentionality of individuals and groups in the making of sensory knowledge from approximately 1500 to 1700. Focused case studies show how artisans, poets, writers, and theologians responded creatively to their environments, filtering the cultural resources at their disposal through the lenses of their own more immediate experiences and concerns. The result was not a single, unified sensory culture, but rather an entangling of micro-cultural dynamics playing out across an archipelago of contexts that dotted the early modern European world—one that saw profound transitions in ways people used sensory knowledge to claim ethical, intellectual, and practical authority.

Through portraits of readers and their responses to texts, Reading Practice reconstructs the contours of the knowledge economy that shaped medicine and science in early modern England. Reading Practice tells the story of how ordinary people grew comfortable learning from commonplace manuscripts and printed books, such as almanacs, medical recipe collections, and herbals. From the turn of the fifteenth century to the close of the sixteenth century, these were the books English people read when they wanted to attend to their health or understand their place in the universe. Before then, these works had largely been the purview of those who could read Latin. Around 1400, however, medical and scientific texts became available in Middle English while manuscripts became less expensive. These vernacular manuscripts invited their readers into a very old and learned conversation: Hippocrates and Galen weren’t distant authorities whose word was law, they were trusted guides, whose advice could be excerpted, rearranged, recombined, and even altered to suit a manuscript compiler’s needs. This conversation continued even after the printing press arrived in England in 1476. Printers mined manuscripts for medical and scientific texts that they would publish throughout the sixteenth century, though the pressures of a commercial printing market encouraged printers to package these old texts in new ways. Without the weight of authority conditioning their reactions and responses to very old knowledge, and with so many editions of practical books to choose from, English readers grew into confident critics and purveyors of natural knowledge in their own right. Melissa Reynolds reconstructs shifting attitudes toward medicine and science over two centuries of seismic change within English culture, attending especially to the effects of the Reformation on attitudes toward nature and the human body. Her study shows how readers learned to be discerning and selective consumers of knowledge gradually, through everyday interactions with utilitarian books.

How does science work? Does it tell us what the world is “really” like? What makes it different from other ways of understanding the universe? In Theory and Reality, Peter Godfrey-Smith addresses these questions by taking the reader on a grand tour of more than a hundred years of debate about science. The result is a completely accessible introduction to the main themes of the philosophy of science. Examples and asides engage the beginning student, a glossary of terms explains key concepts, and suggestions for further reading are included at the end of each chapter. Like no other text in this field, Theory and Reality combines a survey of recent history of the philosophy of science with current key debates that any beginning scholar or critical reader can follow. The second edition is thoroughly updated and expanded by the author with a new chapter on truth, simplicity, and models in science.

Focuses on physical, social and applied athropology, archaeology, linguistics and symbolic communication. Topics include hominid evolution, primate behaviour, genetics, ancient civilizations, cross-cultural studies and social theories.