Vaccinations and Public Concern in History explores vernacular beliefs and practices that surround decisions not to vaccinate. Through the use of ethnographic, media, and narrative analyses, this book explores the vernacular explanatory models used in inoculation decision-making. The research on which the book draws was designed to help create public health education programs and promotional materials that respond to patients' fears, understandings of risk, concerns, and doubts. Exploring the nature of inoculation distrust and miscommunication, Dr. Andrea Kitta identifies areas that require...

Toine Pieters charts the history and development of one of the most important medical substances of the 20th century, Interferon, as a drug. The author looks at the development of Interferon through the worlds of biological and clinical research, the pharmaceutical industry, doctors, patients, and many more.

How do we objectively measure scientific activities? What proportion of economic activities should a society devote to research and development? How can public-sector and private-sector research best be directed to achieve social goals? Governments and researchers from industrial countries have been measuring science and technology for more than eighty years. This text provides a comprehensive account of the attempts to measure science and technology activities in Western countries and the successes and shortcomings of statistical systems.

Between the two World Wars an illness that mainly affects adults over fifty years old became so prominent that it superseded both tuberculosis and syphilis in importance.
As Patrice Pinell shows, the effect of cancer in France before World War Two reached far beyond the question of its mortality rates. Pinell's socio-historical approach to the early developments in the fight against cancer describes how scientific, therapeutic, philanthropic, ethical, social, economics and political interest combined to transform medicine.

With the rise of genomics, the life sciences have entered a new era. This book provides a comprehensive history of mapping procedures as they were developed in classical genetics. An accompanying volume - From Molecular Genetics to Genomics - covers the history of molecular genetics and genomics.

The book shows that the technology of genetic mapping is by no means a recent acquisition of molecular genetics or even genetic engineering. It demonstrates that the development of mapping technologies has accompanied the rise of modern genetics from its very beginnings. In Section One,...

We are in the midst of a digital revolution - until recently, the majority of appliances used in everyday life have been developed with analogue technology. Now, either at home or out and about, we are surrounded by digital technology such as digital "film," audio systems, computers and telephones.

From the late 1940s until the 1970s, analogue technology was a genuine alternative to digital, and the two competing technologies ran parallel with each other. During this period, a community of engineers, scientists, academics and businessmen continued to develop and promote the analogue...

This book focuses on some of the major developments in the history of contemporary (19th and 20th century) mathematics as seen in the broader context of the development of science and culture. Avoiding technicalities, it displays the breadth of contrasting images of mathematics favoured by different countries, schools and historical movements, showing how the conception and practice of mathematics changed over time depending on the cultural and national context. Thus it provides an original perspective for embracing the richness and variety inherent in the development of mathematics....

Planning Armageddon provides the first detailed account of Britain's Command, Control, Intelligence and Communications infrastructure. A central theme of the book is the British-American atomic relationship and its implications for NATO strategy. Based on the recollections of officials and military officers in both Britain and the United States and employing recently declassified government documents, Planning Armageddon presents a systematic analysis of British involvement in nuclear planning from Hiroshima to the development of Polaris. At the same time, it provides an...

We are now accustomed to conceive of science as an instrumental activity, producing numbers, measurements and graphs by means of sophisticated devices. This book investigates the historical process that gave rise to this instrumental culture. The contributors trace the displacement of instruments across the globe, the spread of practices or precision and the circulation and appropriation of skills and knowledge.
Through comparative and contextual approaches, the volume confronts the tension between the local and the global, examining the process of the universalization of science....

The contours of space exploration in the latter half of the 20th century owe much to the seminal but hardly singular event of Sputnik. This work looks at how the event changed history in 1957 when the former Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik.