Promoting scholarly and public understanding of history of science, technology and medicine.
Featured Event
February 3, 2012
Nathaniel Comfort, Matthew Jones, Susan Lindee
What Matters about History of Science and What Do We Do About It?
Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science
Join three distinguished scholars for an evening of big questions: What do historians want audiences to understand about history of science, technology and medicine? What do historians want students to take away from classes, audiences from events, readers from books? What answers to these questions does the community of historians share in common? How do—or should—historians promote what matters about history of science?
News and Notes
“Experiment and Good Sense Must Direct You”: the Social Relations of Health, Healing and Knowledge-Making in Eighteenth-Century Plantation America.
Claire Gherini is a student at Johns Hopkins University. She received a 2011-2012 Dissertation Research Fellowship for her research that links the formal, printed medical ideas theorizing the relationship between illness, season, and climate that emerged among physicians in the eighteenth century to the experimentation with new treatments for illness that took place on the ground in plantations in South Carolina, Virginia, and the British West Indies.
PACHSmörgåsbord Group Blog
An Introduction to the Astrolabe
February 7, 2012 by Darin Hayton
This post make available an ePamphlet version of my “Introductory History of Astrolabes.” The pamphlet is currently available as a PDF or an iBooks format.
Plague Textual Analysis
February 6, 2012 by Darin Hayton
I wanted to see what happens when you feed a few plague tracts into Wordle and to think about whether or not it would be useful in my course on plagues and epidemics. While I’m not sure if it is useful, the results are interesting.
Marketing Drugs, Then and Now
January 29, 2012 by Darin Hayton
An article in the NY Times reports on Mary Ebeling’s recent research on direct marketing in the pharmaceutical industry. It recalls for me the techniques used a century ago to sell patent medicines.
Grinding Telescope Mirrors, Then and Now
January 27, 2012 by Darin Hayton
The recent article at NPR on grinding mirrors for the Giant Magellan Telescope reveals that tacit knowledge and skills are as important now as ever. Technological developments and sophistication do not reduce the role of the skilled technician.
An Introductory History of Astrolabes
January 26, 2012 by Darin Hayton
Shanna Freeman over at Curiosity.com made a significant error in her comments about the astrolabe. In order to correct her missteps, I decided to post a draft of a history of astrolabes I wrote a few years back.
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